Re: Stable list vs versioning

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2016 at 09:51:08PM -0700, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
> On 10/06/2016 09:22 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 06, 2016 at 09:19:50PM -0700, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
> >> Hi!
> >>
> >> On 10/06/2016 08:52 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> >>> On Thu, Oct 06, 2016 at 06:54:43PM -0700, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
> >>>> Hi, Stable!
> >>>>
> >>>> As you might be aware of, some companies that maintain linux kernel
> >>>> drivers have the habit of assigning each driver change a new version
> >>>> number.
> >>> And, as you have found out, that's a horrible thing to do for Linux and
> >>> doesn't work at all :)
> >>>
> >>> Just because it works for other slower-moving operating systems, I
> >>> wouldn't recommend doing it for Linux.
> >> Yes, I'm fully aware of the difficulties, though I was hoping that I,
> >> with the help some bright ideas from the list could come up with a
> >> clever way to make everybody happy.
> > But who has the problem here really?  Not the kernel community or
> > developers, but rather an odd set of unskilled QA people (your word, not
> > mine.)
> >
> > Why can't they get more "skill"?  :)
> >
> > thanks,
> >
> > greg k-h
> 
> Well, I would in no way call our QA people unskilled just because they
> in general don't have the skill to know how to locate a particular,
> sometimes well-hidden git repo and find out if a certain bug is fixed or
> not. Not even Einstein knew how to do that ;)

Huh?  All of the kernel trees we "release" are in one single repo, and
it is very well known (linked to off of the kernel.org site front page):
	https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git

How is that difficult to find?

> But I won't try to argue here. I do think, though, that as long as
> people believe the easier solution is to version each change they will
> keep on doing that and unfortunately as a result important patches won't
> get CC'd stable because that would mess up the versioning.
> 
> From your answer I take it there is no interest from the stable
> maintainers in helping solving this using some kind of mainline hash
> registering tool. I guess perhaps another option is to locally automate
> stable / distro git tree scanning.

Maybe I really don't understand the "issue" you are trying to address
here, can you try to rephrase it by showing a real example of what you
are trying to solve?

But again, there's nothing we can do about out-of-tree code, remember,
they know where we are (and I'll take anything!), but we don't know
where they are...

thanks,

greg k-h