Re: A note on the 5.12-rc1 tag

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 4:43 AM Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz> wrote:
>
> Would it make sense to do a -rc2, now, so new topic branches can be
> started on that one?

I was planning on doing an rc2 earlier, just not "this minute" early.
I was expecting to see a few more of the normal fixes pulls come in,
and perhaps do it Friday instead of the usual Sunday.

Because regardless of an accelerated rc2, I thought it was much more
important to rename rc1 and let people know to avoid it.

And yes, obviously it was inevitably too late for some people, but
doing an rc2 wouldn't have helped those people either. So the most
important part was making rc1 itself less reachable by doing that
"dontuse" rename.

(And I should probably have done that rename even earlier, but I was
waiting to see if I could get more confirmation that it really was
fixed. And in hindsight that was entirely pointless and stupid of me -
we knew there was some serious rc1 problem, and the renaming had
nothing to do with whether it was fixed or not. Oh well. Water under
the bridge).

But I also can heartily just recommend that people who already _did_
start on rc1 to rebase their current - hopefully not extensive - work.
I know I've ranted about rebasing for years, and it has huge
downsides, but the operation does exist because sometimes you just
need to fix serious errors. So _mindful_ rebasing, understanding why
it shouldn't be a normal thing, but doing it when something
exceptional happens - that's not wrong.

               Linus