Well, I do agree that documenting the rules and making them inflexible
shouldn't be the primary goal.
But the fact is, "common sense" hasn't worked very well. I consistently
get pull requests from maintainers that have well-meaning "fix bugs" in
them, and that cause a lot of totally pointless churn.
In fact, this whole discussion has shown one thing: people still think
that "bug fix" somehow automatically means that it's appropriate after the
merge window. That's simply not so.
Linus
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