Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/926240/

The kernel subsystem maintainers out there probably have a deep
understanding of the sinking feeling that results from opening one’s inbox
and seeing a response from Linus Torvalds to a pull request. When all goes
well, pull requests are acted upon silently; a response usually means that
all has not gone well. Several maintainers got to experience that
feeling during the 6.3 merge window, which seemed to generate more than the
usual number of grumpy responses related to merge commits. Avoiding that
situation is not hard, though, with a bit of attention paid to how merges
are done.