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

Mark Brown <[email protected]> Fri, 7 Aug 2026 14:42:48 +0100

Newsgroups	dev.linux.lists.ksummit
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Fri, Aug 07, 2026 at 08:51:50AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Fri, 2026-08-07 at 15:40 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:

> > Then the author could pick any base commit available in Linus' tree
> > the relevant subsystem tree (typically an upstream release of the
> > next branch of the subsystem). Would that have any drawback compared
> > to not specifying any base commit at all ?

> It's just pointless hassle given the maintainer workflow is ignore the
> base commit and do git (or b4) am on the current branch and only if
> that rejects either try and upport based on the base commit or ask for
> a respin (the latter being the most common course of action).

While I routinely don't actually use the base-commit that people provide
it does come in very handy whenever it's hard to work out how to apply
their patches, obviously you can ask what something is based on but it's
easier if the information is just there.  I'm not sure it's worth doing
by hand but it's a great thing to have in tooling.

> > > 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.

> > Isn't that what prerequisite-patch-id is for ?

> Dear god, absolutely not.  I can't match a patch hash to a series, I
> want the lore link of the prerequisite series in the cover letter.

The lore link plus something like the title of the series/patch so the
mail can actually be read directly and you don't have to open a browser
to figure out what the submitter is talking about.

I assume at some point it'll be possible to do something automatically
with the patch IDs at some point.

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