Hi Paul On 6/5/2020 9:28 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
It's probably one of the more challenging parts (along with getting the support upstream in the first place). It's something that is hard to solve in the other distro's too - RHEL for instance also has issues with the audio on the X1C7/X1C8 as it was upstream too late for their 8.2 release (we've addressed it there with a Lenovo copr repository until it's accepted into RHEL). The balance between maintaining stability and cutting edge hardware is hard to solve.On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:20 PM Mark Pearson wrote:I haven't so far got as far as thinking about the backporting stage so I probably need more education there. My goal so far has been to get fixes from upstream into sid so that Debian users can pick them up from there.It sounds like you are saying that the Linux kernel release cycle (every 2-3 months) plus the time it takes them to get into Debian is too slow for Lenovo. While Debian sid is waiting for the next Linux kernel release, it does get updated with Linux kernel stable releases, which get fixes that are backported from the next Linux kernel release. I guess that this might work for some of those fixes, but it would not work for new drivers or new features etc. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-kernel-rules.html
That's where doing a Debian pre-load would be challenging (which is really where this conversation started). If support for a platform isn't there until 6 to 8 months after it's shipped (or more) then really it's not worth doing a preload (note - I'm not saying it's not worth supporting the platform - that is still important0. Fedora have this somewhat solved by being on the latest of everything, Ubuntu solve it by having their oem image model.
My naive aim starting to work with Debian was to get patches/fixes into sid and then figure out the rest from there - I tend to approach one hurdle at a time because my brain is too small to cope with more than that :) At least once it was in sid I could tell Debian users there was a way to get the fix on their platform (albeit with the stability risks - most users I have talked to seem OK with that). I'm wide open to suggestions on how to improve that or help/contribute towards improving that.
Mark