Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: name the libata/linux for-next branch

[Niklas Cassel <cassel@kernel.org>]

Hello Matthias,

On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 06:18:44PM +0800, Matthias Goergens wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 11:32:19AM +0200, Niklas Cassel wrote:
> > I think this could have been written simpler, without references to dates.
> 
> Agreed, your wording is better.  I'll use it, together with the
> s/tree/branch/ fix, in a v2.
> 
> > But in reality, if you want to clean things up, why limit it to these three?
> >
> > Write a script that clones all trees, compares HEAD against what is
> > is Linux Next (Next/Trees file). If it diverges, add the branch name to
> > the tree entry in MAINTAINERS.
> 
> That script is how I found these: about 160 T: lines diverge.  libata
> isn't a one-off; it's in the first small batch of the plan I described
> in the ext4 thread [1].
> 
> I'm sending them in small batches rather than all at once because I'd
> invariably get something wrong, or miss a subsystem's conventions, and
> I'd rather learn that from a handful of maintainers than from 160.
> Exhibit A is the KVM/arm64 reply [2]: that for-next is purely an
> integration branch and patches there must be based on a tag from
> Linus's tree, so naming it would have sent people to the wrong place.
> Comparing HEAD with Next/Trees can't tell that apart from a branch like
> yours.  So I now also look at how each branch is built, and I'm holding
> back the ones that look like integration branches, block included,
> until I know how to word them.
> 
> As for the other two: SCSI went out in the same first batch [3], and
> nvme.git isn't in Next/Trees at all, so the script never flagged it.
> Thanks for the offered Acked-by; I'll Cc you when block comes up.

Okay, nice to see that you are actually putting in the effort to fix all
entries and not just one.

I guess I would have know if you sent it as a series, but that would
probably have been worse than sending a single patch per subsystem,
as I am sure many people will have comments.

Perhaps mention that you are doing a cleanup of all entries after the:

---

line after the commit message, with the links that you shared just now.
That way maintainers will know that you are actually doing a longer
work and not just a one-off.


Kind regards,
Niklas