Linus Torvalds' New Helper Is Working Out Well For Linux 4.21

Initially rolled out in November, the Linux 4.21 merge window is the first time that Linus Torvalds' new helper has been pushed to its limits for assisting both him and those sending in pull requests to the kernel.

One of the changes recently on the kernel mailing list to help in Torvalds' communication with kernel developers is having a bot that lets the developer know if/when their pull request has been honored. Up until now it's been up to Linus Torvalds to manually say it's been pulled or for the kernel developer to keep a close eye over the kernel Git tree. But Linus always didn't email the developer over each pull request, particularly when he didn't have anything to critique. But now with this pr-tracker-bot on duty, there's always a message for each pull request going through.

Here is the standard format of the message from the bot pointing out that the merge happened.

Those curious about the bot itself can learn more on Kernel.org. The bot is coded in Python and is of course open-source.