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.
