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

[Thierry Reding <thierry.reding@kernel.org>]

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On Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 04:42:21AM -0700, Breno Leitao 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?

I think this is a problem that we can easily address using tools. next
already has scripts to detect these issues and I think perhaps we can
provide a variant of those in a way that would allow people to set them
up in their tree as maybe git hooks so they automatically get run on
pre-push or something.

On the trees that I maintain, I do that using a set of scripts that I've
found useful. I know many other maintainers do their own versions of the
same tests and I suspect the maintainers that don't are in the category
of not knowing that they should be checking for these thing or just
don't know how or lack the time/motivation to set this up. If we can
take some of the lessons learned from linux-next and distill it into
some scripts and maybe documentation, I think we can catch the vast
majority of these cases, and the rest we can catch in linux-next, or we
can ask Linus to run this set of sanity checks on merges as a last
resort.

Thierry

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