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

[Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2025 at 01:04:19PM +0200, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
>Hi,
>
>
>I have noticed at least a few cases where sub-maintainers collect
>patches, but their trees are not included linux-next. Or their patches
>are not fed to linux-next.
>
>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.
>
>
>Why is that a problem?
>======================
>Patch was reviewed on the list day X and applied by the sub-maintainer.
>Then for two, three or four weeks, this patch is not being in the
>linux-next means:
>1. Limited or no build bot coverage.
>
>2. No actual integration testing, even if it is just spotting early
>merge conflicts.
>
>3. No wide community testing.
>
>4. Contributors cannot base their patchsets on linux-next for
>convenience, but need to find each sub-maintainer tree and pull it. For
>few cases (see further) these sub-maintainer trees are not documented in
>MAINTAINERS, so it is impossible for contributor to rebase on current
>maintainer's tree!

This topic seems to come up on an annual basis :)

As a follow up to last year's discussion[1] I wrote a bot[2] that is able to
analyze pull requests and respond with statistics about how long commits spent
in -next as well as on the mailing lists. An example of the reports it produces
is available here[3].

I haven't ended up receiving signal from Linus that it's useful and not a waste
of his time, so I stopped sending these mails out.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/ZyAUO0b3z_f_kVnj@sashalap/
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sashal/next-analysis.git/
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/all/Zxf3vp82MfPTWNLx@sashalap/

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha