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

Greg KH
2013-07-16T06:28:23Z

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:10:31AM +0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> 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.

KS is in November, feel free to not tag patches Cc: stable for scsi if
you don't want to use the existing workflow, and try something else now.

All I need, at the least, is a list of git ids to apply to the stable
tree(s), send them to stable@vger.kernel.org and I can take it from
there with my tools.

If you want to test things separately, send me a tree to pull, or a mbox
to apply, that works as well. You can do all of these without having to
wait until November.

thanks,

greg k-h