linux-kernel - Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] KS Topic request: Handling the Stable kernel, let's dump the cc: stable tag

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Date:	Tue, 16 Jul 2013 05:10:01 +0100
From:	Ben Hutchings <ben@...adent.org.uk>
To:	Dave Airlie <airlied@...il.com>
Cc:	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>, Greg KH <greg@...ah.com>,
	ksummit-2013-discuss@...ts.linuxfoundation.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, stable@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] KS Topic request: Handling the Stable
 kernel, let's dump the cc: stable tag

On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 13:27 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Ben Hutchings <ben@...adent.org.uk> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 22:09 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > [...]
> >> > > How important is the stable releases? Are maintainers willing to do a
> >> > > little more work now to make sure their subsystems work fine in older
> >> > > kernels? This isn't the same stable as it was 8 years ago.
> >> >
> >> > And that annoys the hell out of some Linux companies who feel that the
> >> > stable kernels compete with them.  So people working for those companies
> >> > might not get as much help with doing any additional work for stable
> >> > kernel releases (this is not just idle gossip, I've heard it directly
> >> > from management's mouths.)
> >>
> >> Hmm, this is new to me. Really, I thought the whole point of the stable
> >> releases was to help Linux companies.
> > [...]
> >
> > I also heard some managers decided their kernel source packages should
> > have all the patches squashed together to make them harder to cherry-
> > pick... could it have been the same company?
> 
> Greg loves to tell stories about RH management, but really if he can
> find any engineer who works for RH that says he can't work on stable
> due to being told by management, I'd be surprised.

To be clear, I very much appreciate the level of contribution to stable
from RH developers.  And it's a little too high to believe these are
just a few rogues flouting policy. :-)

> Maybe when stable
> first surfaced there was a hope of it being close to RHEL,

The lack of non-trivial driver backports means it's not really
competitive with any commercial distribution.  (But it looks a little
better if you add in compat-drivers.)

> but at this
> point stable has little to no usefulness from a RHEL point of view,
> and since nearly all the RH employed maintainers all do stable work, I
> can't see why Greg would think this matters.
> 
> In fact Greg how much of stable queue does come from Red Hatters?

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Humans are not rational beings; they are rationalising beings.

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