Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Coping with the new-developer flood

On Fri, 2026-08-07 at 14:56 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 07, 2026 at 11:20:39AM +0200, Matthieu Baerts wrote:
> > On 07/08/2026 05:23, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > > There are some few exceptions, where a fix can't be easily
> > > backported to the LTS branch, and so a different way of fixing a
> > > particular serious patch needs to be applied to the LTS branch. 
> > > But normally this will be explicitly stated in the commit
> > > description, but we don't do that in a structured way, so it
> > > might be hard for a non-LLM bot to figure this out.
> > 
> > Good point, but instead of looking at the patch description, it
> > might be enough to look at the header: an exception could be added
> > for patches sent to the stable ML with a version in the prefix.
> > 
> > But back to the idea of checking if the patch can apply: it might
> > not be easy to deal with all the different trees and branches.
> > There might be some dependences that are still in review, or
> > applied somewhere but not in linux-next yet, or conflicts with
> > linux-next, etc.
> 
> This is an issue that isn't limited to newcomers. As a maintainer, I
> sometimes don't know what I should apply a patch series on. We have
> the base-commit and prerequisite-patch-id trailers added by b4 that
> help a lot there, but not everybody uses them. If a mechanism that
> flags the issue for newcomers could also ensure that every patch
> series carries proper base information, that would be a very nice
> side effect. This may include adding new trailers if some use cases
> are not currently covered.

There are two reasons not to insist too rigidly on base commit: firstly
because a lot of series are invariant (they apply to any tree because
there's been no commits in the areas patched) and secondly because the
series has a dependency on another posted but not yet applied patch
series (i.e. no published base commit at all).  At least make it a
Maintainer decision whether to insist on base commit or not.

Regards,

James