If you’re not familiar with reading mailing lists or don’t follow what is happening, Brodie Robertson on YT did a good video on this: https://youtu.be/GhfhzTDQdUU

TL;DR: Some tooling script caused the problem, but it initially seemed like a malicious pull request from kernel developer. It wasn’t and the issue was resolved. The tooling script will be updated with better error messages so this kind of problem should be obvious when it occurs.

Readers: make sure you read the replies. This happened four days ago and has since been resolved.

> Welp, that precisely recreated it -- even identical shas! Looking at
> the b4 output, I do see a suspicious "39 commits" listed for some reason.

Well, that's the point where the user, in theory, goes "this is weird, why is
it 39 commits," and does Ctrl-C, but I'm happy to accept blame here -- we
should be more careful with this operation and bail out whenever we recognize
that something has gone wrong. To begin with, we'll output a listing of all
the commits that will be rewritten, just to make it more obvious when things
are about to go wrong.

> So, I assume the "git-filter-repo" invocation is what mangled it. I will
> try to dig into what b4 actually asked it to do in the morning...

Thanks for looking into this. Linus, this is accurate and I am 100% convinced
that there was no malicious intent. My apologies for being part of the mess
through the tooling.

I will reinstate Kees's account so he can resume his work.

-K