Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: name the ext4 dev branch

[Niklas Cassel <cassel@kernel.org>]

Hello Eric,

On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 09:00:30PM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 11:32:00AM +0800, Matthias Goergens wrote:
> > For the entries, my plan is to start with the roughly 160 T: lines
> > that name a repository whose HEAD is already in mainline while
> > linux-next pulls a different branch from it: one small patch per
> > repository, sent to that entry's maintainers as its own thread.  I'd
> > send a few first, to maintainers who usually respond quickly, and then
> > the rest in larger batches once the first ones have landed or drawn
> > comments.  You know far better than I do how maintainers take this
> > kind of tree-wide cleanup, so I'd welcome your view on that approach
> > before I start.
> 
> Explicitly documenting branches in MAINTAINERS sounds good, but in
> addition to that, HEAD should also be made to point to the correct
> branch (at least in repositories where there is only one main
> development branch).  This can be done using gitolite's symbolic-ref
> command: https://korg.docs.kernel.org/gitolite/index.html#symbolic-ref

For the record, there is no need to use a gitolite specific command,
regular:

$ git remote set-head libata for-next

works.


Damien and I (co-maintainers for libata) had this discussion offline a few
months ago when Sashiko was constantly using the wrong branch.

Assuming that you have a 'fixes' branch and a 'for-next' branch, which
branch should be default?

The branch to use depends on the type of change it is.

And many maintainers can go a very long time without either merging in
'fixes' to 'for-next', or rebasing 'for-next', so critical fixes might
be lacking from 'for-next'.

We decided to keep HEAD pointed to 'master' as that is somewhat neutral.


Kind regards,
Niklas