Re: [Ksummit-discuss] bug-introducing patches

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 2:43 PM, Sasha Levin via Ksummit-discuss
<ksummit-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, May 08, 2018 at 01:59:18PM -0700, David Lang wrote:
>>On Tue, 8 May 2018, Sasha Levin wrote:
>>
>>>There's no one, for example, who picked up vanilla v4.16 and plans to
>>>keep using it for a year.
>>
>>Actually, at a prior job I would do almost exactly that.
>>
>>I never intended to go a year without updating, but it would happen if
>>nothing came up that was related to the hardware/features I was
>>running.
>>
>>so 'no one uses the Linus kernel is false.
>
> My point is not that "no one ever uses Linus kernel" but that no one
> takes one of those kernels and plans to stick with it for 3 months until
> the next one comes up, even if there are updates relevant to that user.
>
> Yes, some users will use a .0 release until either Greg releases a
> -stable, or until the next -rc is out.
>
> What I'm trying to say is that there is that the .0 release makes some
> people rush poorly tested commits in it even though the .0 release is
> not significant in any way.

I think we should take pride in our releases, so I disagree that it is
insignificant. If a maintainer is rushing things into late rc's and
breaking things then they need that feedback, not de-emphasize the
importance of ".0" releases. Could the bar be raised higher on late
fixes, perhaps. I otherwise think the message is already clear
"changes at -rc6,7,8 had better be worthy of and coming in late and be
accompanied with good explanation".