Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] KS Topic request: Handling the Stable kernel, let's dump the cc: stable tag

Greg KH
2013-07-16T06:23:02Z

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 01:27:42PM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 22:09 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > [...]
> >> > > How important is the stable releases? Are maintainers willing to do a
> >> > > little more work now to make sure their subsystems work fine in older
> >> > > kernels? This isn't the same stable as it was 8 years ago.
> >> >
> >> > And that annoys the hell out of some Linux companies who feel that the
> >> > stable kernels compete with them. So people working for those companies
> >> > might not get as much help with doing any additional work for stable
> >> > kernel releases (this is not just idle gossip, I've heard it directly
> >> > from management's mouths.)
> >>
> >> Hmm, this is new to me. Really, I thought the whole point of the stable
> >> releases was to help Linux companies.
> > [...]
> >
> > I also heard some managers decided their kernel source packages should
> > have all the patches squashed together to make them harder to cherry-
> > pick... could it have been the same company?
>
> Greg loves to tell stories about RH management, but really if he can
> find any engineer who works for RH that says he can't work on stable
> due to being told by management, I'd be surprised. Maybe when stable
> first surfaced there was a hope of it being close to RHEL, but at this
> point stable has little to no usefulness from a RHEL point of view,
> and since nearly all the RH employed maintainers all do stable work, I
> can't see why Greg would think this matters.
>
> In fact Greg how much of stable queue does come from Red Hatters?

I always separate RH managers from engineers in their doings because I
know that one does not feel the same as the other.

My point is, if I start asking developers to do more work for the stable
trees, that has the potential to make people not like the stable trees
more for resource issues, and I don't want to do that at all.

greg k-h