[PATCH docs] docs: maintainers: suggest including lore link for conflicts known to linux-next

[Jakub Kicinski]

I'm not completely sure what is the best practice for notifying Linus
about conflicts which have already been resolved in linux-next.
I presume they are a no-op to him, so maybe we shouldn't even call
them out?

That's the question I was hoping to answer by reading this doc :)

For the small-time maintainers who aren't Linus including a lore link
to the resolution from linux-next is the most optimal way in my experience.
Sometimes people put the whole resolution diff into the PR message
which occasionally confuses merge prep scripts making a mess of things...

If Stephen already resolved the problem, just include the link.

Cc: torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
 Documentation/maintainer/rebasing-and-merging.rst | 6 +++++-
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/maintainer/rebasing-and-merging.rst b/Documentation/maintainer/rebasing-and-merging.rst
index 85800ce95ae5..4134e63528fe 100644
--- a/Documentation/maintainer/rebasing-and-merging.rst
+++ b/Documentation/maintainer/rebasing-and-merging.rst
@@ -175,7 +175,11 @@ So what should a maintainer do when there is a conflict between their
 subsystem branch and the mainline?  The most important step is to warn
 Linus in the pull request that the conflict will happen; if nothing else,
 that demonstrates an awareness of how your branch fits into the whole.  For
-especially difficult conflicts, create and push a *separate* branch to show
+conflicts already resolved in linux-next include a lore link to the posted
+resolution.
+
+For especially difficult conflicts and when linux-next resolution is
+not available, create and push a *separate* branch to show
 how you would resolve things.  Mention that branch in your pull request,
 but the pull request itself should be for the unmerged branch.
 
-- 
2.41.0