Re: [PATCH 5.2 000/135] 5.2.10-stable review

[Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]

Hi

On 2019-08-22, Greg KH wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 12:05:27AM +0200, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
> > On 2019-08-22, Greg KH wrote:
> > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 01:05:56PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
[...]
> > It might be down to kernel.org mirroring, but the patch file doesn't
> > seem to be available yet (404), both in the wrong location listed
> > above - and the expected one under
> >
> > 	https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.10-rc1.gz
[...]
> Ah, no, it's not a mirroring problem, Sasha and I didn't know if anyone
> was actually using the patch files anymore, so it was simpler to do a
> release without them to see what happens. :)
>
> Do you rely on these, or can you use the -rc git tree or the quilt
> series?  If you do rely on them, we will work to fix this, it just
> involves some scripting that we didn't get done this morning.

"Rely" is a strong word, I can adapt if they're going away, but
I've been using them so far, as in (slightly simplified):

$ cd patches/upstream/
$ wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/patch-5.2.9.xz
$ xz -d patch-5.2.9.xz
$ wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.10-rc1.gz
$ gunzip patch-5.2.10-rc1.gz
$ vim ../series
$ quilt ...

I can switch to importing the quilt queue with some sed magic (and I
already do that, if interesting or just a larger amounts of patches are
queuing up for more than a day or two), but using the -rc patches has
been convenient in that semi-manual workflow, also to make sure to really
get and test the formal -rc patch, rather than something inbetween.

( When testing -rc patches under e.g. OpenWrt (ipq806x (ARMv7), ath79
  (mips 74Kc), lantiq (mips 24Kc)), importing larger numbers of patches
  (which will go away two or three days later anyways) also easily gets
  a little unwieldy (adding sequence numbers, as the quilt series only
  gets assembled later, on the fly in alphabetical order), so I'd
  probably have to squash them together for those purposes myself - not
  a problem, just less convenient for quick ad-hoc testing. )

But again, none of these procedures are set in stone and I can adapt as
needed - there've been bigger changes in the past and this is mostly
about retraining muscle memory (and writing some simple new scripts to
partially automate things).

Thanks a lot for your efforts, the whole -stable maintenance has really
improved kernel quality compared to the status quo ante. I'm testing
basically each -rc kernel for the current -stable release (so only v5.2
at the moment) on x86_64 and x86, a bit less regularly on ipq8064/ ath79/
lantiq (v4.19 at the moment), but only reply if I actually notice an
issue.

Regards
	Stefan Lippers-Hollmann