Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL for 4.14 015/161] printk: Add console owner and waiter logic to load balance console writes

[Sasha Levin]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 10:43:28PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
>On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Sasha Levin wrote:
>
>> So I think that Linus's claim that users come first applies here as
>> well. If there's a user that cares about a particular feature being
>> broken, then we go ahead and fix his bug rather then ignoring him.
>
>So one extreme is fixing -stable *iff* users actually do report an issue.
>
>The other extreme is backporting everything that potentially looks like a
>potential fix of "something" (according to some arbitrary metric),
>pro-actively.
>
>The former voilates the "users first" rule, the latter has a very, very
>high risk of regressions.
>
>So this whole debate is about finding a compromise.
>
>My gut feeling always was that the statement in
>
>	Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst
>
>is very reasonable, but making the process way more "aggresive" when
>backporting patches is breaking much of its original spirit for me.

I agree that as an enterprise distro taking everything from -stable
isn't the best idea. Ideally you'd want to be close to the first
extreme you've mentioned and only take commits if customers are asking
you to do so.

I think that the rule we're trying to agree upon is the "It must fix
a real bug that bothers people".

I think that we can agree that it's impossible to expect every single
Linux user to go on LKML and complain about a bug he encountered, so the
rule quickly becomes "It must fix a real bug that can bother people".

My "aggressiveness" comes from the whole "bother" part: it doesn't have
to be critical, it doesn't have to cause data corruption, it doesn't
have to be a security issue. It's enough that the bug actually affects a
user in a way he didn't expect it to (if a user doesn't have
expectations, it would fall under the "This could be a problem..."
exception.

We can go into a discussion about what exactly "bothering" is, but on
the flip side, the whole -stable tag is just a way for folks to indicate
they want a given patch reviewed for stable, it's not actually a
guarantee of whether the patch will go in to -stable or not.