Lars Schneider [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On 13 Nov 2016, at 02:13, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:
...
Earlier you said 'pu' did even not build, but do we know where this
"still times out" comes from?  As long as I don't merge anything
prematurely, which I need to be careful about, it shouldn't impact
the upcoming release, but we'd need to figure it out before moving
things forward post release.

What is the goal for 'pu'?

(1) Builds clean on all platforms + passes all tests
(2) Builds clean on all platforms
(3) Builds clean on Linux
(4) Just makes new topics easily available to a broader audience

My understanding was always (4) but the discussion above sounds 
more like (1) or (2)?

The purpose of 'pu' is none of the above, but its intended effect
for people other than me is (4).  It is primarily meant as a way for
me to avoid having to go back to the mailing list archive to find
topics that I felt that were potentially interesting but not yet
ready and may want to get commented on later.  When queued on 'pu',
it is not unusual that I haven't really looked at the patches yet,
and it is not surprising if it does not build on any platform.

When queued to 'pu', the reason of the initial "not yet ready"
assessment may not have anything to do with the quality of the
patches but based on the phase of the development (e.g. during a
feature-freeze, it is less efficient use of our time to take new
topics to 'next'), so what was queued on 'pu' may get merged to
'next' without any update, after getting looked at by me or by
other people and deemed to be worth trying out.

Dscho's mention of 'still times out' may be an indiciation that
something unspecified on 'pu' is not ready to be merged to 'next',
but blocking all of 'pu' with a blanket statement is not useful,
and that was where my response comes from.  We need to know more
to say "this particular topic is not ready", so that we can unblock
other innocent topics.