RFC: Stable kernel updates and the SRU process

[Stefan Bader]

Martin Pitt wrote:
> Stefan Bader [2008-10-28 12:44 -0400]:
>> Still I think it would be better to revert selectively if there are regressions
>> found than only to select a few patches and miss fixes until we get bitten by them.
> 
> That's not actually that preferable. It's generally better to keep
> known bugs which people got used to than breaking something that
> worked before (which is generally a disaster in critical environments,
> whereas bugs which have been there forever are merely an
> inconvenience). That obviously doesn't apply to things like the recent
> e1000 NVRAM incident, but for most severity "normal" bugs.
> 
> Martin
> 

This definitely should be accompanied by a wider or longer testing period. I
fully agree with that. My feeling would be that changes to the upstream stable
kernel are pretty well like SRUs in the way that they normally fix something to
get included. I don't have numbers regarding how many times the kernel broke
because of a stable patch. To minimize the risk there we could delay the import
of the next stable patchset a few weeks as well as enlarge the time an update
has to remain in -proposed.


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