Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Time to call it quits for the maintainer summit?

On Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 04:20:04PM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> We've tried to keep the upstream schedule for ages, as Rodrigo points
> out it falls down, stuff goes missing in the shutdown periods, telling
> teams to stop working for 2-3 weeks isn't an option in most companies.
> Intel and AMD are trying to upstream GPUs that aren't even on the
> market yet, velocity mattters a lot more because thier customers are
> usually on the end of the pipeline via Linus' tree,

Why would anyone need to "stop working" for 2-3 weeks?  That's not what
other trees do, the patches just go into a different queue/tree until
the merge window is over and then they flow into the normal -next branch
(or whatever you want to call it.)

The only one that needs to worry about the merge window is the
maintainers.  Developers just need to be aware of "is this a new feature
or a bugfix", and all other subsystems seem to be able to enforce that
tiny rule, which guides which branch to apply a commit to.

Are GPU driver developers really not aware if they are fixing a bug or
not?  If not, who is doing the crazy cherry-pick in the first place?

And again, I hate how the DRM tree works, and I think overall you
greatly suffer for this model as the "Fixes:" tags all are wrong which
cause regression and CVE tracking to be totally broken for all
backports.  So I guess the teams for those 2 companies don't really care
about stable trees?  :)

thanks,

greg k-h