On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 02:24:54PM +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
Back to the trend. Last week I got autosel mails even for patches that were still being discussed, had issues, and were far from upstream:
https://lkml.kernel.org/r/DM5PR2101MB1032AB19B489D46B717B50D4FBBB0@DM5PR2101... https://lkml.kernel.org/r/DM5PR2101MB10327FA0A7E0D2C901E33B79FBBB0@DM5PR2101...
It might be a good idea if the mail asked to add Fixes: tag or stable mailing list. But the mail suggested to add the unfinished patch into stable branch directly (even before upstreaming?).
I obviously didn't suggest that this patch will go in -stable before it's upstream.
I've started doing those because some folks can't be arsed to reply to a review request for a patch that is months old. I found that if I send these mails while the discussion is still going on I'd get a much better response rate from people.
If you think any of these patches should go in stable there were two ways about it:
- You end up adding the -stable tag yourself, and it would follow the usual route where Greg picks it up. - You reply to that mail, and the patch would wait in a list until my script notices it made it upstream, at which point it would get queued for stable.
Now, there are only hand full of printk patches in each release, so it is still doable. I just do not understand how other maintainers, from much more busy subsystems, could cope with this trend.
By other words. If you want to automatize patch nomination, you might need to automatize also patch review. Or you need to keep the patch rate low. This might mean to nominate only important and rather trivial fixes.
I also have an effort to help review the patches. See what I'm working on for the xfs folks:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/3/29/1113
Where in addition to build tests I'd also run each commit, for each stable kernel through a set of xfstests and provide them along with the mail.
So yes, I'm aware that the volume of patches is huge, but there's not much I can do about it because it's just a subset of the kernel's patch volume and since the kernel gets more and more patches each release, the volume of stable commits is bound to grow as well.