Hey all,

So it's release day and I've put up v2018.07-rc1. The merge window is now closed and I've updated git and the tarballs are also up now.

My patch queue is in OK shape I think. There are however a lot of series of changes that have been iterated over and are about ready to come in, but haven't been posted quite long enough, I'll be picking those up soon.

There's also a few fixes out there I need to grab, and will shortly.

There's also two things I want to talk about with pull requests.

First up, I'm expecting people to make use of checkpatch.pl before sending me a pull request. I got lax about this for a long time, and then discovered that it has been updated for git support. Rather than focus on how long I didn't see this useful thing myself, I want to let everyone know about it. You can do: $ ./scripts/checkpatch.pl --git origin/master..

(Or, whatever upstream you're checking against) and the tool goes off and tells you if there are things to look at, or not. Not every CHECK or WARNING or even ERROR is strictly a problem (the usual thing about string literals or dts files and so on), but if there's little things to fixup, please fix them up.

Second up, signed tags. A few people have been using these for a while, and I like it. I really like and think it's helpful to have a summary in the commit message about what's changed in a given pull. But I think there's a lot more people out there that know about the signed tags workflow from Linux, but don't use it here. So please, if you're in the habit of using signed tags there, use them here too. If you would just like to see what it's all about and start doing them anyhow, please give http://web.mit.edu/git/www/howto/using-signed-tag-in-pull-request.html a read as I think that gives a good overview.

I will follow the usual rule of an -rc every other Monday and we're looking at release on July 9th, 2018.

Thanks all!