Sparse merge window is open

Hi everyone,

After a long break from sparse the project. I have fully returned back
to resume the maintainer role on sparse. I want to thank Luc for
taking great care of the project while I am gone. Looking forward to
the pull request from him again.

I am going through the mailing list for old patches that can be
applied to sparse but I haven't found much yet.

If you have patches that can be applied to sparse, now is a good time
to re-submit them. I want to cut a release after this round of merge
window.

Regarding the sparse vs sparse-dev repo. Here is how I intend to use
these two repo:
1) sparse repo. This is the stable repo, the git history will not
rewind. If something bad happens to the old commit, a revert commit
will be added to remove the problematic commit.
2) sparse-dev repo. This repo is always using sparse stable repo as
base. However the change newer than the sparse stable repo is not
guaranteed to be stable. I might rewind and re-apply a newer version
of the patches. Consider it as a staging repo. I will merge (fast
forward) from the sparse-dev to sparse at about weekly or bi-weekly
bases. Testing please use the sparse-dev repo for the cutting edge
changes.

If you want to submit patches to sparse, recommend using the stable
sparse repo as the base. Only use sparse-dev as base if there are very
bleeding edge patches that only exist on sparse-dev.

Pull request please use the sparse repo as well.

Another issue I want to collect some feedback is that, the kernel has
remove the sparse context checker:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-sparse/[email protected]/

Does any once feel strongly removing the lock context code in sparse
itself because the main usage case is now gone?

Chris