-fixes and ff-only

[Sean Paul]

Hey maintainers,
I'm noticing a trend which is unlikely to slow down, so I'd like to get
your input. I send my -fixes (and other) pull requests typically on
Wednesday afternoons (ET) to allow Dave plenty of time to pick them up and
send them to Linus.

Unfortunately this means that if anything applied to -fixes between the
pull being sent and me getting into work on Monday morning (after the
latest rc is cut) will result in a backmerge instead of a fast forward. In
previous releases, volume was low enough that I won the race most weeks.
However, now that we have (many) more contributors, I almost always expect
to lose.

So, what do? Intel has a drm-intel-next-queued where they manually sort and
apply their patches to the various trees. This allows them to wait for the
next rc before piling on any more fixes. I don't expect this will work for
-misc since it likely requires more time and collaboration than we have to
give.

We could create a drm-misc-fixes-queued branch and leave drm-misc-fixes to
be manually curated by the maintainer handling the current release. Of
course, that same person would need to ensure that drm-misc-fixes-queued is
maintained as well (does intel just regularly backmerge to dinq
regularly?). Are there any other options we're missing?

Sean