On Wed, 2020-11-18 at 09:09 -0500, Sasha Levin wrote:
On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 11:29:16PM +0100, Christoph Biedl wrote:
On the other hand the pace of the stable patches became fairly high¹, so during a week of -rc review a *lot* of them will queue up and I predict we'll see requests for fast-laning some of them. Also, a release would immediately be followed by the next -rc review period, a procedure that gives me a bad feeling.
Keep in mind that the stable tree derives itself from Linus's tree - it's not a development tree on it's own and we don't control how many fixes flow into Linus's tree (and as a result into the stable tree).
This means that it doesn't matter how long the review window is open for, you'll be getting the same time to review a single patch - whether we do 200 patches twice a week or 400 patches once a week. We can't create time by moving review windows around.
How long does it take for patches reaching Linux's tree to propagate down to the stable trees and is there is mechanism for identifying followup patches? For instance, patch A fixes bug X but we eventually find out that this patch did not fix all occurrences of the bug or caused a regression and hence the author immediately sent patch B for inclusion in mainline (Linux's tree). Is patch B automatically identified for inclusion in stable as well?
In short, is there a guarantee that stable trees are as stable or better than mainline through the current SOP?
Regards, Hussam.