Den 19.04.2018 kl. 18:09, skrev Sasha Levin:
On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 06:04:26PM +0300, Thomas Backlund wrote:
Den 19.04.2018 kl. 16:59, skrev Greg KH:
Anyway, we are trying not to do this, but it does, and will, occasionally happen. Look, we just did that for one platform for 4.9.94! And the key to all of this is good testing, which we are now doing, and hopefully you are also doing as well.
Yeah, but having to test stuff with known breakages is no fun, so we try to avoid that
Known breakages are easier to deal with than unknown ones :)
well, if a system worked before the update, but not after... Guess wich one we want...
I think that that "bug compatability" is basically a policy on *which* regressions you'll see vs *if* you'll see a regression.
No. Intentionally breaking known working code in a stable branch is never ok.
As I said before... something that never worked is not a regression, but breaking a previously working setup is...
That goes for security fixes too... there is not much point in a security fix, if it basically turns into a local DOS when the system stops working...
People will just boot older code and there you have it...
We'll never pull in a commit that introduces a bug but doesn't fix another one, right? So if you have to deal with a regression anyway, might as well deal with a regression that is also seen on mainline, so that when you upgrade your stable kernel you'll keep the same set of regressions to deal with.
Here I actually like the comment Linus posted about API breakage earlier in this thread...
<quote> If you break user workflows, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.
Even security is secondary to "people don't use the end result, because it doesn't work for them any more". </quote>
_This_ same statement should be aknowledged / enforced in stable trees too IMHO...
Because this is what will happend...
simple logic... if it does not work, the enduser will boot an earlier kernel... missing "all the good fixes" (including security ones) just because one fix is bad.
For example in this AUTOSEL round there is 161 fixes of wich the enduser never gets the 160 "supposedly good ones" when one is "bad"...
How is that a "good thing" ?
And trying to tell those that get hit "this will force upstream to fix it faster, so you get a working setup in some days/weeks/months..." is not going to work...
Heh, This even reminds me that this is just as annoying as when MS started to "bundle monthly security updates" and you get 95% installed just to realize that the last 5% does not work (or install at all) and you have to rollback to something working thus missing the needed security fixes...
Same flawed logic...
Thnakfully we as distro maintainers can avoid some of the breakage for our enduses...
-- Thomas