Patches have to be in Linus's tree before they land in -stable. That's been the policy for at least as long as I remember. Also, Greg does releases of -stable e

Patches have to be in Linus's tree before they land in -stable. That's been the policy for at least as long as I remember. Also, Greg does releases of -stable every week or two -- waiting 8 weeks for patches (that Linus has already merged) makes very little sense. Yes, fixup patches are something that need to be handled separately but Greg has always handled those properly (and good kernel devs use the Fixes: tags and always Cc: stable on those fixup patches). Not to mention you'd need to handle fixup patches even if you did depend on releases (if a bug was introduced in a released version it's usually fixed by the next -rc1 -- so waiting means the newest kernel is broken needlessly for 8 weeks).