Vetter: Linux Kernel Maintainer Statistics

"So even if you don't see a Reviewed-by or Signed-off-by tag, you have to check whether the maintainer next up in the chain is looking at what he's merging."

I pretty much assume that pulls are exactly for the case where you're delegating review to someone else.

If I'm willing to review individual patches, I may as well apply them while I'm at it.

As I see it the advantages of a pull/merge over applying a patch series is a) it's a quicker more convenient way to merge a whole bunch of development, and b) it records *exactly* the state of the other developer's tree, so that if a problem is introduced we'll know whether it came from my tree, their tree, or the merge itself.

Both of those are most useful if I'm delegating the review to someone else rather than doing it myself.

So I'd take "X pulled Z from Y" to be a pretty strong hint that X did *not* review Y. (But rather than X trusts Y to do a good job of Z.)