Re: [Xen-devel] tags in backport commits

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 13 Jun 2017, George Dunlap wrote:
> On 13/06/17 08:28, Jan Beulich wrote:
> >> Moreover, I think we should start using tags in our staging commits
> >> which specify to which trees a given commit should be backported to as
> >> soon as it passes the push gate.
> > 
> > But that's already a possibly controversial aspect: Some backports
> > better don't happen immediately, so the tagging shouldn't be tied
> > to when the backport is to occur, and hence ...
> 
> ...
> 
> > ... I'm not convinced this will help much with backport automation
> > (which I'm not convinced is a good idea anyway - the risk of build
> > breakage in particular is just too high if no human intervention is
> > intended at all anymore before pushing to the respective stable
> > trees).
> 
> Automatically *discovering* things to be backported is also a form of
> automation.  If a script to look for backport candidates is run once a
> week, a stable tree maintainer could still sensibly decide which ones to
> apply and when.

That's right, that is what I meant. If we want to build any helper tools
to give us an hand in figuring out what should be backported, we need a
way to encode some information with the commits. It doesn't mean that
everything should be backported automatically.


> > Furthermore - who would you mean to create these tags? In the
> > end I think it should be the person responsible for the respective
> > parts of the stable trees to decide if and how far such backports
> > ought to occur, so neither the person submitting the patch nor
> > the person committing the patch are in the position to give more
> > than a hint here (again speaking against using such tags for
> > automation).
> 
> We could require that the "stable" tag be acked by any stable tree
> maintainers that it affects.

Yes, that is where CC: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx comes into play. The people
at stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx should ack or request a chance to the
backporting info. The first step would be to create a mailing list for
that.

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.xen.org/xen-devel