Andrew Morton's first pull request

A milestone of sorts passed quietly on the kernel mailing lists this week. Andrew Morton has been a core part of the development process for many years. He played a key role in moving the kernel from multi-year release cycles toward quick integration of new code, a process which culminated at the 2004 Kernel Summit. But, for all of that, Morton has never been a fan of Git and has not used it; rather than sending pull requests to Linus Torvalds, he has sent massive patch-bomb emails instead.

As was discussed at the recent Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, that is changing. The new way of doing things became evident on Friday the 13th, when Morton sent his first-ever pull request to Torvalds. The resulting mainline merge included a note from Torvalds reading: "And yes, that's a real pull request from Andrew, not me creating a branch from emailed patches. Woo-hoo!"

Old dogs, it seems, can eventually learn new tricks after all.

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