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

James Bottomley
2013-07-16T06:10:31Z

On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 17:06 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 06:01:39PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 14:44 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> >
> > > I don't like this at all, just for the simple reason that it will push
> > > the majority of the work of stable kernel development on to the
> > > subsystem maintainers, who have enough work to do as it is.
> > >
> > > Stable tree stuff should cause almost _no_ extra burden on the kernel
> > > developers, because it is something that I, and a few other people, have
> > > agreed to do with our time. It has taken me 8 _years_ to finally get
> > > maintainers to agree to mark stuff for the stable tree, and fine-tune a
> > > development process that makes it easy for us to do this backport work.
> >
> > Although, since those 8 years, the stable tree has proven its
> > importance.
> >
> > Is a extra "ack" also too much to ask?
>
> Maintainers are our most limited resource, I'm getting their "ack" when
> they themselves tag the patch to be backported with the Cc: line.
>
> I then cc: them when the patch goes into the patch queue.
>
> I then cc: them again when the patch is in the -rc1 phase.
>
> How many times do I need to do this to give people a chance to say
> "nak"?

Just to pick up on this, the problem from my perspective is that this
cc: goes into my personal inbox. From a list perspective this just
doesn't work. The entirety of my workflow is set up to operate from the
mailing lists. My inbox is for my day job. It gets about 100 emails or
more a day and anything that goes in there and doesn't get looked at for
a day gets lost. I sometimes feel guilty about seeing stable reviews
whiz by, but not necessarily guilty enough to go back and try to find
them. I have thought of using filtering to manually place these into a
deferred mailbox for later use. However, the problem is that my work
inbox is exchange, and the only tags I could filter on seem to be in the
body (exchange does body filtering about as elegantly as a penguin
flies).

That's where the suggestion to drop cc: stable@ came from. I realise
the workflow just isn't working for me.

I say we have the discussion at KS then I'll investigate a different
workflow for SCSI.

James