[PATCH] SubmittingPatches: abandoning a series
From: Junio C Hamano <hidden>
Date: 2026-07-08 01:20:56
The document describes an idealized life cycle for a patch series, where an author scratches their itch, improves the patch(es) with help from fellow reviewers, and iterate until their work becomes a part of Git. But sometimes a topic may have to be abandoned or retracted, with an option to later resurrect it when they can, and it is much better than leaving a topic in limbo. Clearly state that we encourage contributors to explicitly retract their topic that did not succeed. Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <redacted> --- Documentation/SubmittingPatches | 15 +++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+)
diff --git c/Documentation/SubmittingPatches w/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
index f042bb5aaf..f14ae20aaa 100644
--- c/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
+++ w/Documentation/SubmittingPatches@@ -95,6 +95,21 @@ input and avoids unnecessary churn from many rapid iterations. top, it gets merged to the 'master' branch and waits to become part of the next major release. +But sometimes things do not work as planned. + +. A discussion on the list might convince you that your changes are + not such a good idea, in which case you are expected to explicitly + retract the topic, to releave the maintainer from having to worry + about it. + +. You may have to stop pursuing the topic due to various reasons like + lack of time, other commitments, shifting priorities, etc. It is a + friendly thing to do to tell the list in such a case, so that others + interested in the topic can take over the topic and continue. When + there is no taker, the maintainer may have to discard the topic, but + anybody can resurrect the topic later when they (including you) can + spend more time on it. + In the following sections, many techniques and conventions are listed to help your patches get reviewed effectively in such a life cycle.