Following Andrew Morton's recent comment, "this just isn't working any more," Miles Lane asked, "what can be done to reduce the huge number of build fixes required to release an MM tree?" Andrew jokingly replied, "my mind turns to cattle prods." Regarding the suggestion that he could publicly list the offenders he quipped, "I could name names, but it would look like 'grep @ MAINTAINERS' ;))" He continued to say, "I don't think much can be done about it, really," going on to explain:

"See, what I do is to merge probably hundreds of patches into the -mm-only part of the tree and then, after a few days, get down and compile-test it all, then fix it, then runtime test it all, then fix that. Because it is vastly more efficient to do all this work against hundreds of patches than it is to do it against one patch at a time, no?

"And guess what? All the other maintainers do the same thing: someone sends you a patch, it looks good, so you commit it. After you've committed a decent batch of patches, get in there and test it all. Problem is, I often will get in there and do all that testing before the subsystem-tree owner has done his testing."