On Thu, Sep 11, 2025 at 01:04:19PM +0200, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:

> I don’t see a good reason to keep valid, proper patches - collected by
> trusted sub-maintainers and intended for upstream submission - out of
> linux-next. If a sub-maintainer is trusted in collecting patches and
> sending them to the upstream maintainer, these commits should be visible
> in the linux-next.

> I have occasionally asked sub-maintainers to add their trees to the
> linux-next, and sometimes this worked. In other cases it could not work
> for various reasons, e.g. workflow of the upstream maintainer or
> reluctance to share commits early. These reasons are what I would like
> to discuss and, hopefully, improve.

Yes, this is especially frustrating when it's fixes trees and you end up
with breakage in -next for a week or whatever while you wait for a fix
to make it's way to the upstream maintainer's tree.  If that's something
like a boot or build break it can obscure a bunch of other testing, not
just the issue itself, which is even less helpful.  Where this is a
problem I really don't understand the reasoning of the relevant
maintainers.

Mostly people are totally happy to put their trees in -next and either
forgot or simply weren't aware they could do it.

> Identifying the patches
> =======================
> There are two cases here for patches committed by sub-maintainers, but
> never fed to next:
> 1. The upstream maintainer took them via pull request.
> 2. The upstream maintainer rebased everything - changing commit date (to
> add their own Signed-off-by? otherwise why would you rebase a pull
> request from someone you trust?).

There is the case where people send things to the list as a patch series
with a pull request in the cover letter, the stuff in the pull request
hasn't actually been reviewed yet.  Not sure how common that is, I have
discussed a workflow like that with some of the people who send to me
but I'm not actually doing it myself.  None of the cases you found
immediately look like that.

You might also catch cases where there was a pre-next test phase, that
lasting two weeks should be very unusual though.