On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 09:43:08AM -0400, Martin K. Petersen wrote:

> 1. I could just always revert instead of dropping the patches. The
>    downside is that we end up with a pretty messy history because, as I
>    pointed out above, it's usually a matter of dropping tens of patches
>    at a time and not reverting a single offending commit. In addition,
>    having a messy history makes it harder on distro kernel people to
>    track driver updates.

I used to deal with this by using topic branches heavily and making my
-next be an automated merge of those branches, if something went badly I
could just throw away the branch.  I stopped for a while because Linus
didn't like the number of branches I was creating, though it wasn't a
problem with the approach in general.