Re: [PATCH] process/release: mention MAINTAINER adjustments

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 20.03.2025 13:47, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 20/03/2025 12:12 pm, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> For many major releases I've been updating ./MAINTAINERS _after_ the
>> respective branch was handed over to me. That update, however, is
>> relevant not only from the .1 minor release onwards, but right from the
>> .0 release. Hence it ought to be done as one of the last things before
>> tagging the tree for the new major release.
>>
>> See the seemingly unrelated parts (as far as the commit subject goes) of
>> e.g. 9d465658b405 ("update Xen version to 4.20.1-pre") for an example.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>
>> ---
>> As can also be seen from the referenced commit, the document already
>> saying "drop any references to the specific commits, e.g. date or title"
>> hasn't been honored in recent releases, at least as far as
>> QEMU_TRADITIONAL_REVISION goes.
> 
> Oh, lovely.  I wasn't even aware there was a necessary change like
> this.  Also, I haven't made as much progress rewriting the checklist as
> I would have liked, so it is probably best to insert into this doc for now.
> 
> The qemu-trad comments I think we can just strip out of staging.  We
> don't have equivalent comments for the other trees.

Right, I was wondering what else might be stale there. Yet then I wanted
to focus on just the one issue that ran into repeatedly.

> I'm not sure if it's useful to delete the check-in policy.  I think the
> note at the top listing the backport maintainers is good enough.

If everyone agrees it should stay there, so be it. So far no-one complained
that is got dropped from stable trees. Personally I find it too verbose for
stable; an abridged version would do. Yet it's pretty rare that stable-only
patches are submitted in the first place. Plus the entire contents of
MAINTAINERS is frequently stale on stable branches anyway, so one needs to
go to the master branch one anyway for up-to-date information.

Jan