On Thu, May 03, 2018 at 02:46:14PM +0000, Sasha Levin wrote: > I'll work on breaking up the 4.16 commits into categories, but one > interesting statistic I've noticed while starting the work is: > > Fixes in -rc cycles: > rc1 68 > rc2 147 > rc3 88 > rc4 121 > rc5 40 > rc6 193 > rc7 98 > > Average days in -next, for a fix, per -rc cycle: > rc1 27.25 > rc2 21.4286 > rc3 22.5114 > rc4 18.281 > rc5 14.65 > rc6 12.6166 > rc7 8.70408 > > Fixes for bugs not introduced in current merge window: > rc1 40 > rc2 113 > rc3 61 > rc4 79 > rc5 25 > rc6 139 > rc7 72 > > So for some reason, there is a rush to push fixes for older bugs (that > were not introduced in the current merge window) to the point that rc7 > commits that only existed for a few days are merged in to address older > bugs.
IMHO it's because it's the time it takes for users to start to trust the 3rd or 4th stable release of the previous version, to switch to it, to face a bug, to report it, and for the maintainer to write a fix. I wouldn't be much surprised if you'd find that among those not introduced in the current merge window, many were introduced in the previous release. Willy