Linux 4.15 rc1

o it's been the usual two weeks of merge window, and rc1 is out.

And that normal time length is about the only thing usual about this
merge window. Because of the indiscriminate mass slaughter of turkeys
in the US last week, lots of people - including me - were on vacation.
That meant that I had asked for people to try to make the merge window
front-heavy, but it also meant that then during the second week I was
rather more strict than usual in what I pulled.

In particular, it mean that developers that sent pull requests in the
second week that weren't just follow-up fixes ended up getting more
scrutiny than usual. In particular, if I got a late pull request, I
required that the thing had actually been in linux-next, since one of
the effects of traveling with a laptop is that I don't end up doing
the usual full module builds in between every pull.

The good news is that almost all major updates did come in during the
first week. A big "Thank you" for that to the people involved. I could
start my travels seeing that I only had a few hundred commits in
linux-next that hadn't been merged already.

And in fact, I really liked the whole "if you send me stuff late, it
had better have been in linux-next" policy. It was slightly
inconvenient this time around because I hadn't actually automated the
checks, so doing the whole validation actually took more time and
effort on my part than it would have taken to just pull things, which
to some degree was counter-productive on my part, since the whole
point was that I had less time than usual during the second week. But
at the same time I _really_ didn't want to encourage people to send
stuff late.

The _other_ unexpected thing about this merge window was that it was
pretty big. I had expected a largish drop-off after the 4.14 LTS
release, like we had with 4.9. But that never happened, probably
because 4.14 wasn't as huge a release as 4.9 was (it was just somewhat
painful in taking much too long to calm down).

Anyway, if I missed something last week, just remind me and let me
know - I might do late pulls. But as mentioned, people really did seem
to be pretty good about front-loading the merge window and I think
we're good to go.

Go forth and test, and hopefully 4.15 will not have the calming-down
delays that 4.14 had.

                Linus

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