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

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 01:55:37PM +0200, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
> >> 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.

>From my perspective, I don't really want to force contributors to manually
provide the tree information, but it's helpful if tooling includes it
automatically.

Specifically, I am working on a service that eager-builds git bundles for all
submitted patch series -- the goal is to make it simple for CI systems to
fetch patch submissions as bundles that are already applicable against
mainline. Knowing which tree and commit the series is based on is really
helpful when figuring this out.

-K