Re: [PATCH] docs: submitting-patches: Require base tree information

[Rob Herring <robh@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 08:28:06AM +0100, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
> On 26/10/2026 21:12, Rob Herring wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 6:55 AM Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> All these tools should just work on top of linux-next. Requiring people
> >>>> to add base like "next-20261021" or "tip-of-obvious-maintainer-tree" is
> >>>> pointless. I understand that base is helping, but helping and requiring
> >>>> an obvious information just do not go together.
> >>>>
> >>>> So again: base has ZERO meaning to the maintainer process. It has
> >>>> meaning to tools, so fix the tools to work on known and obvious trees.
> >>>
> >>> So what is your proposed algorithm to apply an arbitrary patch when
> >>
> >> Already provided that, so to recap:
> >>
> >>> there's no base-commit?  Including any historical patch (from
> >>> months/years ago), patches with dependencies, etc.
> >>
> >> Dependency is something else, but for every other patch:
> >> 1. For testing/CI: you apply on top of next
> >> 2. Every other case the maintainer knows where to apply it, because it
> >> is his HEAD of next-branch.
> >>
> >> I am repeating myself, but I really had no single problem of lack of
> >> knowledge where to apply a patch as a maintainer or reviewer of some
> >> subsystem, thus maybe I do not understand the actual problem you are
> >> experiencing.
> > 
> > Look at our DT PW. There are numerous patches that don't apply and
> > then we silently don't test them at all. Here's one example[1] (3
> > actually as the whole series doesn't apply). The more base-commit
> > tags, the better. If b4 can't apply it, then I do try just linux-next,
> > but is that today's, yesterday's or 2 weeks ago? That still doesn't
> > work sometimes.
> 
> I have doubts that DT CI would know these mentioned bases, unless
> everyone develops on master, which is obviously not possible. It could
> work if CI has all possible next tags fetched, but then I argue that
> without base commit such CI could apply to closest linux-next tag by date.

I fetch the last 5 next trees or so. b4 will also try to guess the base, 
but that doesn't seem to work all that well. If this is "easy", then b4 
should just work without issue, right?

Rob