On Tue, 17 Apr 2018 14:04:36 +0000 Sasha Levin Alexander.Levin@microsoft.com wrote:
The solution to this, in my opinion, is to automate the whole selection and review process. We do selection using AI, and we run every possible test that's relevant to that subsystem.
At which point, the amount of work a human needs to do to review a patch shrinks into something far more managable for some maintainers.
I guess the real question is, who are the stable kernels for? Is it just a place to look at to see what distros should think about. A superset of what distros would take. Then distros would have a nice place to look to find what patches they should look at. But the stable tree itself wont be used. But it's not being used today by major distros (Red Hat and SuSE). Debian may be using it, but that's because the stable maintainer for its kernels is also the Debian maintainer.
Who are the customers of the stable trees? They are the ones that should be determining the "equation" for what goes into it.
Personally, I use stable as a one off from mainline. Like I mentioned in another email. I'm currently on 4.15.x and will probably move to 4.16.x next. Unless there's some critical bug announcement, I update my machines once a month. I originally just used mainline, but that was a bit too unstable for my work machines ;-)
-- Steve