Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Hidden commits from next (aka why maintainers hoard them in backpack)

[Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>]

Hi Laurent,

On Thu, 11 Sept 2025 at 14:27, Laurent Pinchart
<laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 11, 2025 at 01:04:19PM +0200, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
> Linear histories have upsides, but rebasing causes pain. drm-misc is one
> case of linear history with limited pain: with dozens (hundreds ?) of
> committers, patches are pushed to drm-misc pretty much right away once
> they're approved, and they end up in linux-next. Committers do not hoard
> patches in their private trees for weeks or even days before pushing to
> drm-misc. The linear history is in this case likely a good compromise:
> it simplifies the workflow for committers, while not introducing rebases
> down the line (the only rebase operations happen right away when a
> committer picks a patch and loses the race with other committers to push
> it to drm-misc).

And after that, several of them are cherry-picked to a fixes branch...

> > Just a friendly note, Laurent, I appreciate your work and I do not want
> > to point that you committed it incorrectly. In the contrary - your
> > commit is right, but your upstream maintainer stops you from including
> > this in linux-next. My aim here is only to discuss and improve the process.
>
> I would be happy to have my tree included in linux-next. I'm worried
> that the fact that the media subsystem cherry-picks my pull requests
> instead of merging them would cause issues though. Am I worrying
> needlessly, or is that a real issue ?

I think you would start receiving "same commit present in multiple
trees with different commit IDs"-emails from sfr...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds