Date:	Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:54:10 -0700
From:	Don deJuan <donjuansjiz@...il.com>
To:	Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@...il.com>
CC:	Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
	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 04/16/2012 02:50 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> 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.

Because it was only "tested" through the mailing list on Arch-general. 
Like I stated your issue was related to you and not understanding Arch 
AND how that kernel was tested before being pushed to the repo's


>
> 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.
>

Learn the distro you are using better.
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