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

[Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@linaro.org>]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2025 at 01:05:36PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> 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.

One thing that would help is if someone breaks linux-next and then post
the fix but also let us know when it will be merged into linux-next.
Sometimes people fix the patch silently without responding to the bug
report.  Or they post the patch and we assume it's going to be merged
the next day but they want to test it for an extra day or two first.

regards,
dan carpenter