Date:	Thu, 12 Apr 2012 21:43:33 +0300
From:	Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@...il.com>
To:	Adrian Chadd <adrian@...ebsd.org>
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 Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 8:24 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian@...ebsd.org> wrote:
> 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.

But this is exactly the opposite; the patch that broke things is in
the 'release branch' (3.3.1); it's not in upstream (3.3). Sure, it's
also on a later upstream, which is also broken.

But then are you saying that if upstream is broken (3.4-rc2), then
stable should be broken as well (3.3.1), and remain broken until
upstream is fixed? I fail to see what would be the point of that.

> 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.

And why do you think the same would happen here if *one patch* is applied?

Plus, git is developed this way; and yes, you might say the gates are
opened when there's a new non-maintenance release, but the same
happens in Linux.  It's not the rule of 'first on X' branch that keeps
the gates safe; it's the amount of patches.

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

So, in your mind "correct" is "never ever do an exception", even if
this strictness leads to less stability. If the objective is not
stability, I would call this the 'backports' tree then, which might or
might not lead to stability.

Rules are not perfect, why not add a new rule "It reverts an earlier
patch to 'stable'.", then you would be both following the rules, and
ensuring more stability :)

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras
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