On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 10:48:14AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
On 12.07.23 21:00, Greg KH wrote:
On Wed, Jul 12, 2023 at 07:02:34PM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
On 12.07.23 17:16, Greg KH wrote:
[...]
.. warning:: The branches in the -stable-rc tree are rebased each time a new -rc is released, as they are created by taking the latest release and applying the patches from the stable-queue on top.
Yes, that is true, but they are also rebased sometimes in intermediate places, before a -rc is released, just to give CI systems a chance to test easier.
[...]
Nevertheless makes me wonder: is that strategy wise in times when some ordinary users and some distributions are building kernels straight from git repos instead of tarballs? I'm one of those, as I distribute stable-rc packages for Fedora here: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/groups/g/kernel-vanilla/coprs/
As we keep the patches in quilt, not git, it's the best we can do. The -rc releases are never a straight-line if we have to do multiple ones, we remove patches in the middle, add them at the end or beginning, and sometimes even change existing ones.
All of this is stuff that a linear history tool like git can't really model well, so we keep a quilt series of the patches in git for anyone that want to generate the tree themselves, and we provide the -rc git tree for those that don't want to generate it and can live with the constant rebasing.
/me first didn't want to reply, as this is not really important, but then reconsidered; again, feel free to just ignore this
FWIW, I do not consider that rebasing to be problem at all; it are those rebases "sometimes in intermediate places, before a -rc is released, just to give CI systems a chance to test easier" make things this slightly annoying bit harder when you want to distribute stable-rc releases to users.
But as I said, I can fully understand why you do those as well. I just with there was a way to reliably get a -rc release from git as well. Simply tagging them when you do a -rc release would solve all that. Is that maybe something that could be easily added to your -rc release scripts?
I can add a tag, but it would have to be a tag that can be rebased, and git doesn't like that very well :)
/me looks at https://github.com/gregkh/gregkh-linux/tree/master/stable but failed to find the -rc release script :-/
Hah, no github, it's at: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git/tree...
But I don't think tags will help much. I'll let anyone who actually runs a CI that uses this to speak up to see if it would before adding them.
Also, as proof this works, I just got a report of someone testing the queues and finding a problem at the moment, before we sent anything out for review. So this is working well today.
thanks,
greg k-h