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

Jiri Kosina
2013-07-15T23:40:28Z

On Tue, 16 Jul 2013, Jiri Kosina wrote:

> (*) For me personally, the best mode of operation would actually be to
> have for-stable/3.x branches in my git tree, cherry-pick from other
> topic branches once the patches are in Linus' tree, and send you pull
> request for stable regularly (for each stable branch separately of
> course)
>
> This model would make maintainers clearly responsible for the contents
> of stable tree, wouldn't cause any extra work for you (quite the
> contrary, I'd say), and it'd follow the development model we have for
> Linus' tree.

... and it will actually have a nice self-regulatory feature (in case
maintainers who are pushing too much stuff your way are part of the
problem).

Preparing a proper pull request requires much more care, "stopping and
thinking for a while", formulating the pull request, than just blindly
tossing "Cc: stable" everywhere in a headless-chicken mode.

To sum it up:

- if the maintainers really do care about their patches being in the
-stable tree, this wouldn't cost them too much extra time

- if they are just randomly pushing everything to -stable because "hey,
why not", this will be an extra hurdle for them to overcome, and they
will be revealed easily by poor pull request justification

- if the maintainers are lazy and don't care about preparing stable
branches, it's their responsibility (and their shame) that -stable will
be missing the code they are responsible for

- it offloads the work from single point of failure (you) to the
maintainers, which makes a lot of sense to me

- it aligns the workflow with the workflow that's in place for Linus'
already (and not only there) to be more or less a proper git workflow

--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs