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To:     Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
Cc:     Mike Christie <michael.christie@oracle.com>,
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From:   Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL 5.9 22/33] vhost scsi: add lun parser helper
Message-ID: <d071d714-3ebd-6929-3f3b-c941cce109f8@redhat.com>
Date:   Fri, 4 Dec 2020 18:08:13 +0100
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On 04/12/20 16:49, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 09:27:28AM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> On 01/12/20 00:59, Sasha Levin wrote:
>>>
>>> It's quite easy to NAK a patch too, just reply saying "no" and it'll be
>>> dropped (just like this patch was dropped right after your first reply)
>>> so the burden on maintainers is minimal.
>>
>> The maintainers are _already_ marking patches with "Cc: stable".  That 
> 
> They're not, though. Some forget, some subsystems don't mark anything,
> some don't mark it as it's not stable material when it lands in their
> tree but then it turns out to be one if it sits there for too long.

That means some subsystems will be worse as far as stable release 
support goes.  That's not a problem:

- some subsystems have people paid to do backports to LTS releases when 
patches don't apply; others don't, if the patch doesn't apply the bug is 
simply not fixed in LTS releases

- some subsystems are worse than others even in "normal" releases :)

>> (plus backports) is where the burden on maintainers should start and 
>> end.  I don't see the need to second guess them.
> 
> This is similar to describing our CI infrastructure as "second
> guessing": why are we second guessing authors and maintainers who are
> obviously doing the right thing by testing their patches and reporting
> issues to them?

No, it's not the same.  CI helps finding bugs before you have to waste 
time spending bisecting regressions across thousands of commits.  The 
lack of stable tags _can_ certainly be a problem, but it solves itself 
sooner or later when people upgrade their kernel.

> Are you saying that you have always gotten stable tags right? never
> missed a stable tag where one should go?

Of course I did, just like I have introduced bugs.  But at least I try 
to do my best both at adding stable tags and at not introducing bugs.

Paolo