Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Any feedback for -next?

[Lee Jones <lee@kernel.org>]

On Wed, 12 Aug 2026, Steven Rostedt wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:42:21 -0700
> Breno Leitao <leitao@debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 05:54:59PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> > > Any other ideas?  
> > 
> > I'm new to this area, so please forgive what might be a silly
> > question: would it make sense for maintainers' -next trees to keep
> > a stable git history?
> > 
> > Some maintainer trees are already stable and append-only, which
> > gives linux-next users/testers stable commits to point to, instead
> > of ephemeral commits that can disappear later due to history
> > rewrites.
> > 
> > Would getting rid of these ephemeral commits make linux-next easier
> > to work with?
> 
> This has come up at the Maintainers Summit in the past. I believe it is
> even in the article I posted earlier in another thread.
> 
>    https://lwn.net/Articles/1050027/
> 
> We are even discussing issues about this in that other thread as well:
> 
>   https://lore.kernel.org/all/0a8c1e90-1de1-4a76-b0fa-e367a4bd4f55@sirena.org.uk/
> 
> I try to keep my linux-next branch clean, but I do rebase to add tags. I do
> on occasion remove commits if they prove to be totally broken. That's rare
> but I rather have that then having to push something to Linus where a bunch
> of commits are simply reverted.

+1

FWIW, I have always reserved the right to rebase in order to remove,
move around, reword and otherwise fix-up commits and do so often.  To
that end my 'next' branches are not, have ever been, nor do I intend
them to ever be, stable.

-- 
Lee Jones