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

[Matthias Goergens <matthias.goergens@gmail.com>]

Hi Ted,

A short report on how the T: cleanup went, as promised.

The documentation patch is at v2 [1].  It now only describes the
syntax: a git T: entry may name a branch, or an entry may have several
T: lines, and what each branch is for is left to the subsystem's P:
profile or the maintainer.  Niklas Cassel, Krzysztof Kozlowski and Eric
Biggers reviewed it and Marc Zyngier acked it; no word from Jon yet.

I sent one patch each to 18 repositories, a few a day.  Three were
picked up (libata, clk, mfd), three have acks or reviews (ext4, phy,
fbdev), six had no reply, and the rest I withdrew or am withdrawing.
Most objections came down to two points.  One branch cannot describe a
tree with both a fixes and a next branch (Greg Kroah-Hartman, Guenter
Roeck).  And several maintainers want contributors to start from
mainline, not from their next branch (Fan Wu, Marc Zyngier); Petr
Mladek and Miroslav Benes added that T: names a repository, and that
review tools should get their own pointer if they need one.

The trigger was Sashiko, the AI review bot, reviewing against a
repository's default branch even when mainline had long since merged
it.  That is now fixed in Sashiko itself: since 28 September it skips
such a branch and uses linux-next.  So I am not sending the 46 further
patches I had prepared.

For ext4 the patch is still correct, but no tool needs it any more, so
take it only if you want it there for people; dropping it is fine.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260925120047.1093617-1-matthias.goergens@gmail.com/

Thanks,
Matthias