linux-kernel - Re: [ 00/78] 3.3.2-stable review

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Date:	Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:24:55 -0700
From:	Adrian Chadd <adrian@...ebsd.org>
To:	Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@...il.com>
Cc:	Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
	Sergio Correia <lists@...e.net>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	stable@...r.kernel.org, torvalds@...ux-foundation.org,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk,
	linux-wireless Mailing List <linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org>,
	Sujith Manoharan <c_manoha@....qualcomm.com>,
	"ath9k-devel@...ts.ath9k.org" <ath9k-devel@...ema.h4ckr.net>,
	"John W. Linville" <linville@...driver.com>
Subject: Re: [ 00/78] 3.3.2-stable review

On 12 April 2012 09:49, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@...il.com> wrote:

>>
>> A revert is the same as a patch.  It needs to be in Linus's tree before
>> I can add it to the stable releases.
>
> Right, because otherwise people's systems would actually work.
>
> But hey, as I said, following rules is more important, regardless of
> what the rules are, and why they are there. The rules that actually
> triggered this issue in v3.3.1, as this is not in v3.3.
>
> You could just accept that the patch should have never landed in
> v3.3.1 in the first place, but it's much easier to arbitrarily keep
> stacking patches without thinking too much about them.

Greg is doing the right thing here. We face the same deal in FreeBSD -
people want fixes to go into a release branch first, but if you do
that you break the development flow - which is "stuff goes into -HEAD
and is then backported to the release branches."

If you don't do this, you risk having people do (more, all)
development and testing on a release branch and never test -HEAD (or
"upstream linux" here). Once you open that particular flood gate, it's
hard to close.

We had this problem with Squid. People ran and developed on Squid-2.4.
The head version of Squid-2 was stable, but that isn't what people ran
in production. They wanted features and bugfixes against Squid-2.2,
squid-2.4, and not Squid-2.STABLE (which at the time was
Squid-2.6/Sqiud-2.7.) That .. didn't work. Things diverged quite
quickly and it got very ugly.

So I applaud Greg for sticking to correct stable release engineering
here. We over in the BSD world know just how painful that is. :)

Adrian
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