On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Sasha Levin wrote:
So I think that Linus's claim that users come first applies here as well. If there's a user that cares about a particular feature being broken, then we go ahead and fix his bug rather then ignoring him.
So one extreme is fixing -stable *iff* users actually do report an issue.
The other extreme is backporting everything that potentially looks like a potential fix of "something" (according to some arbitrary metric), pro-actively.
The former voilates the "users first" rule, the latter has a very, very high risk of regressions.
So this whole debate is about finding a compromise.
My gut feeling always was that the statement in
Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst
is very reasonable, but making the process way more "aggresive" when backporting patches is breaking much of its original spirit for me.