[OpenAFS-devel] Moving Forwards

[Marc Dionne]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Ken Dreyer <ktdreyer@ktdreyer.com> wrote:
> 3) What is the policy (official, or conventional) for getting
> backports into 1_6_x? I have cherry-picked several of Marc's commits
> for newer kernels from master to 1_6_1 in order to get 1.6.1 to build
> on Fedora 18/19 for RPM Fusion. I imagine that these patches haven't
> been backported to 1_6_x at this time because Marc / Gatekeepers don't
> have the time. Is it ok if I just submit my cherry-picking efforts to
> Gerrit against 1_6_x myself, or is that going to interfere with some
> process that the Gatekeepers already do?  I would love to see these
> get into 1.6.2 or 1.6.3.

The patches for Linux 3.5 were put in the 1.6 branch a while back, I
think Anders Kaseorg did the cherry-picking and push.  I've just
pushed the commits needed for the upcoming 3.6 kernel to the 1.6
branch.

The exact policy has never been 100% clear to me, but I don't think
anyone objects to people pushing patches that they feel they need.  I
rarely compile or run 1.6 so I don't tend to have a high priority in
porting changes there.  Ideally we'd probably make a decision about
backporting as soon as a patch is merged in master (a release manager
could be involved here) and do it then.  As it is it's hard to be sure
that something important wasn't missed, and it's a big job to scan a
large number of changes and do backporting on a large scale when
preparing a release.
If the feeling is that it is the developer's responsibility to
promptly backport their changes to the stable branches (if
appropriate) I can certainly try to do so in the future.

Marc