[dpdk-stable] What kind of commits can be backported to help the process

[Yuanhan Liu]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 11:23:45AM +0100, Nélio Laranjeiro wrote:
> Hi stable mailing list,
> 
> As written in the subject, it is not fully clear on what kind of patches
> can enter this branch.
> 
> Some fixes apply easily on top of other ones which may not be related,
> the question is on those "unrelated" patches.  Is it acceptable to
> backport them, and if yes at what point is it acceptable depending on
> the nature of the patch:
> 
>  1. Re-work: just a refactor of some structure, clean-up, ...
>  2. Behavior: it change the behavior of a part of the code, ...
>  3. Performances: it impacts performances (positively or negatively).
>  4. None, the patch must apply by itself.
>  5. ...
> 
> What is the expectation for this branch?

Here is the typical flow I took to pick commits to a specific stable
branch:

- firstly, I will get a list of bug fixing commits, with the help of
  devtools/git-log-fixes.sh (as well as the "cc: stable at dpdk.org" tag
  inside the commit log).

  Those commits fix some bugs in a former releases, thus they will be
  applied to a specific stable branch.

- Some of them could be applied cleanly. I will then drop a note to
  all related people (the author, the reviewer, etc) and stable list,
  to inform that this commit will be in a specific stable release.

- And some of them could not be applied cleanly, when conflicts happens
  (code base could be changed).

  When that happens, I will try to backport it by myself if the commit
  is simple enough (say, just few lines of code and the conflicts could
  be easily fixed).

  If not, I will stop (to not mess something up because I'm not familar
  with the code), instead I will then ask the author (and even, the
  maintainer) to do the backport. And that's how the 'request-backport'
  email comes.

So to answer your question. The backport should be easy (when one guy
knows the code enough). If it invovles re-work and changes the behavior
the commit doesn't have, it basically means it's done wrongly.

That helps?

	--yliu