KernelTrap: Linux: 2.6.16.y, Defining Stable

“In August 2006 Adrian Bunk took over maintainership of the
2.6.16.y stable kernel. With the release of the 2.6.16.30-pre1
patch, concerns were expressed as to what makes a stable tree. The
inclusion of new features led -stable maintainer Greg K-H to
observe, ‘all of these patches seem like these are new features
being backported to the 2.6.16.y kernel, which is not really
allowed under the current -stable rules.’ Adrian responded, ‘they
add support for additional hardware to the saa7134 driver. If you
look at the actual diff there’s not much that could cause any
regression since nearly all of these changes don’t change anything
for the already supported cards.’ Greg cautioned, ‘if you want to
accept new drivers and backports like this, I think you will find
it very hard to determine what to say yes or no to in the future.
It’s the main problem that everyone who has tried to maintain a
stable tree has run into, that is why we set up the -stable rules
to be what they are for that very reason…'”

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