Maintaining stable stability

In any event, I recall I had been running the last few 5.5-rc kernels on my hardware and everything was working fine. Then when 5.5.0 came out, suddenly the WiFi didn't work at all. Within just a few hours of 5.5.0 dropping, I had a patch submitted to the linux-wireless mailing list. But it still took several weeks before the patch found its way into the mainline and subsequently was admitted into stable. So there were a number of 5.5.x releases that had this regression in them.

I felt like it took too long to get that patched for 5.5.x users. While I'm quite sure it doesn't *always* take that long to get patches integrated into stable, if avoiding regressions is highly desirable, then getting patches quickly when they *do* occur should be highly desirable, as well.

Seems like we could improve processes around admitting patches for regressions, especially very obvious ones like an entire family of devices that quit working altogether. But, I'm not really heavily involved in the community, so don't have any specific recommendations of how to do that, only my one anecdote that tells me there seems to be some room for improvement.

(I'm entirely open to the possibility that there already is some way to expedite patches like this, and that in my case because I simply wasn't aware of it, and because I didn't use the right "channels", it took longer than it might have otherwise).