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

[Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>]

On 10/20/26 3:07 PM, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2026 at 09:22:35PM +0000, Eric Biggers wrote:
>> Many patches still don't include base tree information and can't be
>> applied.  Such patches can't be properly reviewed or tested, nor can
>> they be accepted.  submitting-patches.rst already describes how to
>> include base tree information, but it's characterized as optional,
>> appears only towards the end of the document, and is missing details.
> 
> I'm happy with this change, but I'd disambiguate the title a bit. With b4, we
> started providing both a base-commit and base-tree footer, specifically
> because often times the "base-commit:" line by itself is not sufficient.
> 
> Imagine this scenario: a developer is working on some code in a feature branch
> and come across a pre-existing bug. They create a fork off of their feature
> branch to fix the bug and send it in. In this situation, the "base-commit"
> footer would be meaningless, because it references some transient commit-id in
> their feature branch. In an ideal scenario, the developer would rebase that
> bugfix branch on a known tag, but that doesn't always happen.
> 
> This observation doesn't really preclude this patch from being accepted, I'm
> just recording my own experience that, by itself, base-commit is often
> insufficient.

Yeah, I was wondering about specifying tree as well as commit, so thanks
answering before I even asked the question.

Most of my patches are made against linux-next.  So: is this going to be
acceptable?

(for linux-next-20261020:)
base-commit: 053966c344dbd346e71305f530e91ea77916189f
base-tree: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git master

linux-next how has over 400 trees in it. That's a tad prohibitive AFA cloning is
concerned.


thanks.
-- 
~Randy