-next status as at v7.1-rc6

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2026 at 17:04, Paul Moore <paul at paul-moore.com> wrote:
>
> It's worth mentioning that resolving the merge issue was relatively
> straightforward and we had a tested patch ready in a few hours

This is not the reason I'm not going to pull it - the merge issue was
just the reminder I got about an earlier email that I had dropped on
the floor.

No, the reason I won't pull it is that the main developer I pull bpf
code NAK'ed it.

Now, I will cdertainly sometimes override maintainers, so it's not
like a NAK is always some final thing.

I don't _like_ overriding developers, but I'll do it when I feel it is
necessary to make forward progress.

But I also have to  feel people have been unnecessarily difficult, and
I have been extensively informed about the decision and I feel like I
can make a reasonable judgement on it.

So it happens, but it happens with my explicit understanding.

My tree is *not* some kind of "we are bypassing developers by sending
a pull request directly to Linus" tree.

NEVER is that the way things get done.

[ Yes, that too has happened, and I have done that unwittingly because
I didn't realize what was going on ]

So I will not pull this tree. End of story.

The way to get me to override developers is to make me aware of the
conflict and convince me that yes, something needs overriding - but it
is typically not very easy to do with active developers.

And honestly, I also have two+ decades of history of "LSM people
cannot agree on a single thing".

That is _literally_ why the LSM layer exists in the first place.

So when LSM people then disagree with _other_ developers, quite
frankly my immediate and visceral reaction then is "oh, these people
who have decades of history of not being able to even agree amongst
themselves are now disagreeing with outsiders too".

Put another way: LSM people have a  higher barrier to convince me that
I should take their disagreements seriously.

And no, I'm afraid that may not be entirely fair.  But "history of
being disagreeable" is a thing.

              Linus