Re: get_maintainer, b4, and CC: stable

Theodore Ts'o
2023-08-10T16:03:13Z

On Wed, Aug 09, 2023 at 06:21:51PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 09, 2023 at 09:50:00AM -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
>
> > I suspect that either b4 or get_maintainer could see the Fixes tag and
> > then suggest to Cc stable for me.
>
> > Should get_maintainer.pl make such recommendations?
>
> People use the Fixes tag all the time for bugs that never made it into a
> release...

I agree that it probably shouldn't.

Sometimes the bug was introduced by a commit that didn't have a Cc:
stable@kernel.org, but it gets automatically pulled into a LTS kernel
due to dependency reasons, or otherwise gets auto-selected into an LTS
kernel. So I try to add Fixes tags even for bugs that never make it
into the stable kernel --- but that doesn't mean that it should
automatically get a cc stable tag.

(Of course, it might be that the AUTOSEL process will automatically
pull in such commit, and then pull in something probably should not
been pulled into a stable tree, but this is why XFS has stable
backports maintainers --- because they don't trust the LTS automation.
For ext4, we probably see one of those sorts of the auto-backports
caused a regression maybe once a year? But that's a different
debate.)

- Ted