Date:	Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:50:03 +0300
From:	Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@...il.com>
To:	Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Cc:	Stefan Richter <stefanr@...6.in-berlin.de>,
	"ath9k-devel@...ts.ath9k.org" <ath9k-devel@...ema.h4ckr.net>,
	linux-wireless Mailing List <linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, stable@...r.kernel.org,
	"John W. Linville" <linville@...driver.com>,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, torvalds@...ux-foundation.org,
	alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk
Subject: Re: [ath9k-devel] [ 00/78] 3.3.2-stable review

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:27 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:18:13AM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:58 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> > On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:11:05PM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> >> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> >> > Just one minor correction in this looney email thread:
>> >> >
>> >> > On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 01:53:22AM +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> >> >> v3.3.x on the other hand are *not* stable. They contain patches
>> >> >> backported from v3.4, but nobody guarantees they will work. There was
>> >> >> no v3.3.1-rc1, so the first time the patches compromising v3.3.1 were
>> >> >> generally tested together is in v3.3.1, at which point if somebody
>> >> >> finds issues, it's too late; bad patches are *not* going to be removed
>> >> >> in v3.3.2.
>> >> >
>> >> > Of course there was a 3.3.1-rc1, see the linux-kernel archives for the
>> >> > announcemen and the individual patches.  kernel.org has the large patch
>> >> > itself if you like that format instead.
>> >>
>> >> I don't see it here:
>> >> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=tags
>> >>
>> >> If you really want people to try it, why not tag it?
>> >
>> > That would be because I don't keep it in that tree.  It is in a quilt
>> > tree you can find in the stable-queue.git repo, and I have never tagged
>> > -rc1 releases there.  No one has ever asked for it before, so in the
>> > past 6 years of stable releases, I guess no one ever needed it.
>> >
>> > ketchup and tarballs seem to work well for others, perhaps you can use
>> > that as well (hint, ketchup on top of the linux-stable tree works just
>> > fine for testing this.)
>>
>> Perhaps the current process will be continue to be OK, but I do
>> believe a tagged v3.3.1-rc1 would have catched the ath9k issue.
>
> How exactly would that have helped here?

More people would have given it a try. Not that many people read the
mailing list, and the ones that do certainly might want to avoid
applying a big series of patches; even if their mail client makes it
easy (mine (Gmail) doesn't). A tag, and an announcement to give a try
would make it *much* easier.

> You point out:
>
>> I used to compile my own kernels and use your stable tree, but this a
>> new laptop and I was using Arch Linux which automatically updated to
>> v3.3.1, and with no network I had no way to revert to v3.2.x.
>> Fortunately I had the kernel sources available, but I wonder how many
>> people were completely stuck.
>
> Arch wouldn't have included a -rc in their kernel (unless they are
> crazy), so this would not have helped your situation at all.

There's *a lot* of people that got affected by the 3.3.1 release; we
don't need to break a lot of boxes to figure out there's an issue,
only a few would suffice, even one.

>> If some other 3.x.1 release get broken this way, I would seriously
>> consider tagging v3.x.1-rc1 as well. It works for Linus' tree.
>
> "this way" was for a very tiny subset of hardware, so odds are, if this
> happens again, it wouldn't be caught this way either.  That subset just
> happened to show up in your machine, but, for example, not in the wide
> range of hardware I test with here, nor the machines that others test
> with.

It was certainly not just me. I have seen a lot of people mentioning
"their wifi is broken", a lot of them using Arch Linux,
coincidentally.

These issues would most likely not be caught before v3.x.1, and which
point it's too late, they cannot be reverted to v3.x.2 just like that;
they have to wait for upstream. Hopefully and probably everything
would go smooth like this time, but maybe not, we'll have to wait and
see. With more people using Arch Linux and thus the latest "stable"
release, I'd say we might see an increase in these kinds of issues.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras
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