The latest file system corruption issue (Nominally fixed by ffe81d45322c ("blk-mq: fix corruption with direct issue") later fixed by c616cbee97ae ("blk-mq: punt failed direct issue to dispatch list")) brought a lot of rightfully concerned users asking about release schedules. 4.18 went EOL on Nov 21 and Fedora rebased to 4.19.3 on Nov 23. When the issue started getting visibility, users were left with the option of running known EOL 4.18.x kernels or running a 4.19 series that could corrupt their data. Admittedly, the risk of running the EOL kernel was pretty low given how recent it was, but it's still not a great look to tell people to run something marked EOL.
I'm wondering if there's anything we can do to make things easier on kernel consumers. Bugs will certainly happen but it really makes it hard to push the "always run the latest stable" narrative if there isn't a good fallback when things go seriously wrong. I don't actually have a great proposal for a solution here other than retroactively bringing back 4.18 (which I don't think Greg would like) but I figured I should at least bring it up.
Thanks, Laura