On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 07:22:32PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Fri 22-12-17 18:07:23, Sasha Levin wrote:
I don't try and override maintainers, I mostly try to get fixes out of subsystems where maintainers/authors partially (or just don't) mark their commits for stable.
Well, I have see quite some MM patches and I believe we are quite good at marking patches for stable trees... I also think we we (as the whole kernel) are much better are using Fixes tag (although it is over used sometimes).
Indeed, mm/ is probably as good as it gets in the kernel.
Moreover it makes more sense to push on those maintainers than try to substitude them without being so closely familiar with the subsystem. If missing backports result in bug reports then this just increase the pressure on those maintainers /me think.
Both is happening, but it's difficult to force maintainers into doing anything, as you might have guessed...
I'm hoping that one result of this work is a tool we can stick into scripts/ (maybe glue it to checkpatch) that'll alert when the patch is -stable material and suggest adding tags.
These patches also go through a much longer review process than commits that are marked for stable (there are at least 3 emails issued for each such commit, and at least 1 week (usually much more) is given for reviews).
Does any of the maintainers read those emails? How many acks/reviewes do you get for those patches for the stable tree? To be honest I tend to
I get a fair amount of reviews which seems to be slightly above what -stable tagged patches get, which is good.
Acks are not expected, and are not happening too often.
ignore those patchbombs most of the time because it is simply impossible to handle them for me. I try to help backporting obvious fixes but reviewing seemingly randomly selected patch which applies and changelog looks reasonaly is simply out of my time budget. Not to mention that this is not just about the patch itself but also the tree it is applied to and other patches that are in the same pile.
I'd hope that these patches aren't "random" :)
For some background, this is based on Julia Lawall's work (and paper https://soarsmu.github.io/papers/icse12-patch.pdf).