Re: stable commit notes

[Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 09:15:26AM -0400, Levin, Alexander wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 02:34:07AM -0400, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > Hi Sasha,
> > 
> > On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 01:54:40PM -0400, Levin, Alexander wrote:
> > > I've decided to automate the bits I had for tracking stable mailing list
> > > discussion and wrap it into the git notes interface to make it easy for
> > > stable maintainers to track discussions related to stable commits.
> > 
> > I actually think it's a good idea. I already use notes locally when I
> > know I have to take care of certain commits, or when I want to mark that
> > I already tested them. I don't know how practical this will be over the
> > long term but it can definitely help.
> 
> What's the concern about long term? My view is that if this will encourage
> reviews in the long term.

I'm not saying I have a concern, all I'm saying is that ideas which sound
good initially have to prove good over time, that's all. You can ask Greg,
the stable maintenance process has evolved quite a bit over the last 8 years
(and that's for good).

> > In fact I think that in the ideal case we would propagate fixes from most
> > recent versions to oldest ones. This normally completely avoids all such
> > issues. But the reality is different as the older kernels we're maintaining
> > don't have the same release cycles so it's hard to expect that your 4.1
> > fetches from 4.4, then feeds your 3.18 which then feeds Ben's 3.16, then
> > Greg's 3.14, then Jiri's 3.12, then my 3.10 etc... So the reality is that
> > we're re-doing some part of the work on our respective sides and checking
> > in other branches if we find anything relevant. Thus I pick from 3.14, and
> > check for the equivalent 3.12 patches in my mbox to see if I notice any
> > particular comment regarding the backport. That obviously doesn't mean it's
> > riskless, just that the risk is reasonably low. At worst I'll pick a bug
> > and its fix like I did this time without noticing it.
> 
> Ideally, if the process is automated enough it could work this way. It also
> means that we'll need just 1 maintainer rather than 5 :)

Sure, and we are the ones causing the mess and making Greg's life harder
sometimes.

(...)
> > > Updating is just a matter of fetching again. I'll make sure to push updates
> > > on a daily basis.
> > 
> > I'll definitely give it a try ASAP. If you can add a link to the
> > discussion thread based on the message ID, it would be really cool!
> 
> I can look into that. Right now I get the mails from my offlinemap dir, so
> I'll need to figure out how to do that.

Often it's a matter of matter of just appending the message ID you have
in the Message-ID header (without the brackets) to certain MID services like
mid.gmane.org (dead) or marc.info. For example :

    http://marc.info/?i=1471979939.13300.168.camel@decadent.org.uk

Cheers,
Willy