Linus Torvalds: Linux 6.1-rc7

Another week has gone by. It started quietly, and I was fairly sure
that it being Thanksgiving week here in the US would mean that it
would continue fairly quietly too.

But I was wrong. The end of the week was the usual "people send me
their stuff on Friday", and the weekend hardly slowed people down. And
so the stats for this week look almost exactly the same as they did
for the previous two weeks.

And it's not just the statistics - everything feels very similar.
There is really nothing here that makes me at all worried, except that
it's just a bit more than I'm comfortable with. It should just have
slowed down more by now.

As a result, I'm now pretty sure that this is going to be one of those
"we'll have an extra week and I'll make an rc8" releases. Which then
in turn means that now the next merge window will be solidly in the
holiday season. Whatever. It is what it is.

Now, this means that I will be more hard-nosed than usual in the next
merge window: the usual rule is that things that I get sent for the
merge window should have been all ready _before_ the merge window
opened. But with the merge window happening largely during the holiday
season, I'll just be enforcing that pretty strictly. I want to see all
that work in the pull requests having been done *before* the
festivities, not while you're imbibing your egg-nog and just generally
being stressed out about the season. If I get sent pull requests late,
I'll just go "this can wait". Ok?

Now, I suspect that everybody _else_ wants to get their work out
before the holiday season starts too, so I hope that we're all in
complete and violent agreement about this all. But I thought I'd start
making people aware of this.

Anyway, enough about the next release. Right now we're still in the
last couple of weeks of this one, so let's make it count. Go test, and
can we _please_ just start calming things down? Don't send me anything
that isn't a clear and present bug. No more last-minute cleanups.
Hear?

            Linus