On Thu, May 03, 2018 at 11:55:29AM -0700, Greg KH wrote: > Don't care about me for stuff like this. Fix it correctly and I'll > worry about any dependancy issues later :)
For me the real value of the Fixes header is to let the person doing the backport know if they must search when the patch looks irrelevant at first glance. On old kernels more than half of the patches don't apply and sometimes you really do not know if the code moved somewhere else or if it was not there. Fixes gives some clues what to look for and sometimes about an exact commit to get more details. I've been quite happy with those mentioning only "3.2+" in it just like those copy-pasting the commit ID is pretty fine as well. The former making it easier to skip a useless patch, the latter providing more information. But in my opinion these must not add burden on the committer. Even some vague information like "4.4, maybe 4.2" or "oldest one having subsystem foo" is extremely helpful there. The dependency chain however matters less because once you start fighting with a small patch set for 1 hour you can spend an extra minute testing several combinations or figuring the dependencies in mainline. Willy
