Linus Torvalds: Linux 6.17-rc5

Things remain normal - both the diffstat and the commit counts look
entirely sane. I'd claim that it's all small patches, but we do have
one larger one: the DLink/Sundance driver was resurrected, so in
between all the one- and few-liners, there's a revert that brings back
2k lines in the form that driver.

But if you ignore that one-off oddity, the rest is very much normal.
As usual, it's half drivers (networking, gpu and sound stand out,
although there's also some unusual pcmcia noise in the form of dead
code removal).

The rest mostly is a mix of tooling (perf and selftests), some random
filesystem, architecture and mm fixes. And other smaller stuff.

Nothing particular to report, the shortlog below gives some rough idea
of what's been going on if you care for details.

The one discussion that I was part of that happened last week that
might be worth mentioning is that I've been complaining for years
about useless "Link:" entries in commit messages that don't point to
any new information. When I merge things and note something
questionable and start digging deeper in order to understand what's
going on, one of the things I do is follow links. And if that link
ends up being just a pointer to the email that became that commit -
with nothing else - that allegedly helpful link only added human cost
for me.

The same ends up being true when chasing down bug reports.

So please: don't add useless information to commits in general, but in
_particular_ don't add "Link:" tags that only point back to the
original submission email. Yes, we have tooling that does it
automatically, but tooling should not be used to increase the human
burden. Tooling should _help_, not hurt.

Make the links be something *useful*. Make them point to the report
for the bug that was the cause of the commit. Make them point to the
discussion that explains the impetus for the commit. But do *not*
mindlessly just use tooling to create a link that doesn't add anything
that isn't already right there in the commit.

I realize that people think the link makes the commit look more "real"
or whatever. And I've heard people claim that discussion happens later
in the thread that the link points to. Neither of those are actually
true. When bugs happen, people don't go to the original emailed patch
to talk about them. Much of the time the reporter can't even tell
which patch caused it - and if they did bisect it, we already have the
information - there's no value add in going back to the original
emailed patch.

So if a link doesn't have any extra relevant information in it, just
don't add it at all in some misguided hope that tomorrow it will be
useful.

Make "Link:" tags be something to celebrate, not something to curse
because they are worthless and waste peoples time.

Please?

            Linus