linux-kernel - Re: A note on the 5.12-rc1 tag

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Date:   Thu, 4 Mar 2021 13:43:14 +0100
From:   Pavel Machek <pavel@....cz>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: A note on the 5.12-rc1 tag

Hi!

> Hey peeps - some of you may have already noticed that in my public git
> tree, the "v5.12-rc1" tag has magically been renamed to
> "v5.12-rc1-dontuse". It's still the same object, it still says
> "v5.12-rc1" internally, and it is still is signed by me, but the
> user-visible name of the tag has changed.
> 
> The reason is fairly straightforward: this merge window, we had a very
> innocuous code cleanup and simplification that raised no red flags at
> all, but had a subtle and very nasty bug in it: swap files stopped
> working right.  And they stopped working in a particularly bad way:
> the offset of the start of the swap file was lost.
> 
> Swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the
> filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results.

Fun :-(.

> One additional reason for this note is that I want to not just warn
> people to not run this if you have a swapfile - even if you are
> personally not impacted (like I am, and probably most people are -
> swap partitions all around) - I want to make sure that nobody starts
> new topic branches using that 5.12-rc1 tag. I know a few developers
> tend to go "Ok, rc1 is out, I got all my development work into this
> merge window, I will now fast-forward to rc1 and use that as a base
> for the next release". Don't do it this time. It may work perfectly
> well for you because you have the common partition setup, but it can
> end up being a horrible base for anybody else that might end up
> bisecting into that area.

Would it make sense to do a -rc2, now, so new topic branches can be
started on that one?

Best regards,
								Pavel
-- 
http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek

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