On Thu, May 03, 2018 at 11:47:24AM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
On Mon 2018-04-16 21:18:47, Sasha Levin wrote:
On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 10:43:28PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
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.
I agree that as an enterprise distro taking everything from -stable isn't the best idea. Ideally you'd want to be close to the first
Original purpose of -stable was "to be common base of enterprise distros" and our documentation still says it is.
I guess that the world changes?
At this point calling enterprise distros a niche wouldn't be too far from the truth. Furthermore, some enterprise distros (as stated earlier in this thread) don't even follow -stable anymore and cherry pick their own commits.
So no, the main driving force behind -stable is not traditional enterprise distributions.
I think that we can agree that it's impossible to expect every single Linux user to go on LKML and complain about a bug he encountered, so the rule quickly becomes "It must fix a real bug that can bother people".
I think you are playing dangerous word games.
My "aggressiveness" comes from the whole "bother" part: it doesn't have to be critical, it doesn't have to cause data corruption, it doesn't have to be a security issue. It's enough that the bug actually affects a user in a way he didn't expect it to (if a user doesn't have expectations, it would fall under the "This could be a problem..." exception.
And it seems documentation says you should be less aggressive and world tells you they expect to be less aggressive. So maybe that's what you should do?
Who is this "world" you're referring to?