Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL for 4.14 015/161] printk: Add console owner and waiter logic to load balance console writes

Linus Torvalds
2018-04-16T19:55:49Z

On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 12:38 PM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
>
> But I don't see in the git history that this was ever reverted. My reply
> saying that "I hope it wasn't reverted", was a response for it being
> reverted in stable, not mainline.

See my other email.

If your'e stable maintainer, and you get a report of a commit that
causes problems, your first reaction probably really should just be
"revert it".

You can always re-apply it later, but a patch that causes problems is
absolutely very much suspect, and automatically should make any stable
maintainer go "that needs much more analysis".

Sure, hopefully automation finds the fix too (ie commit 21b81716c6bf
"ipr: Fix regression when loading firmware") in mainline.

It did have the proper "fixes" tag, so it should hopefully have been
easy to find by the automation that stable people use.

But at the same time, I still maintain that "just revert it" is
rather likely the right solution for stable. If it had a bug once,
maybe it shouldn't have been applied in the first place.

The author can then get notified by the other stable automation, and
at that point argue for "yeah, it was buggy, but together with this
other fix it's really important".

But even when that is the case, I really don't see that the author
should complain about it being reverted. Because it's *such* a
no-brainer in stable.

Linus