Stable release process proposal (Was: Linux 5.10.109)

[Alexey Khoroshilov <khoroshilov@ispras.ru>]

Dear Greg,

First of all, thank you very much for keeping stable maintenance so well.

We (Linux Verification Center of ISPRAS (linuxtesting.org)) are going to
join a team of regular testers for releases in 5.10 stable branch (and
other branches later). We are deploying some test automation for that
and have met an oddity that would to discuss.

Sometimes, like in 5.10.109 release, we have a situation when a
released version (5.10.109) differs from the release candidate
(5.10.109-rс1). In this case there was a patch "llc: only change
llc->dev when bind()succeeds" added to fix a bug in another llc fix.
Unfortunately, as Pavel noted, this patch does not fix a bug, but
introduces a new one, because another commit b37a46683739 ("netdevice:
add the case if dev is NULL") was missed in 5.10 branch.

The problem will be fixed in 5.10.110, but we still have a couple oddities:
- we have a release that should not be recommended for use
- we have a commit message misleading users when says:

    Tested-by: Pavel Machek (CIP) <pavel@denx.de>
    Tested-by: Fox Chen <foxhlchen@gmail.com>
    Tested-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>
    Tested-by: Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org>
    Tested-by: Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com>
    Tested-by: Salvatore Bonaccorso <carnil@debian.org>
    Tested-by: Linux Kernel Functional Testing <lkft@linaro.org>
    Tested-by: Sudip Mukherjee <sudip.mukherjee@codethink.co.uk>
    Tested-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>

but actually nobody tested that version.

There are potential modifications in stable release process that can
prevent such problems:

(1) to always release rс2 when there are changes in rc1 introduced

(2) to avoid Tested-by: section from release commits in such situations.

Or may be it is overkill and it too complicates maintenance work to be
worth. What do you think?


Best regards,
Alexey Khoroshilov