Anyhow, to me the dependency is obvious, but I've followed the MM meeting discussions, development etc.
Right but is it clear to Andrew? I mean the cover letter was super unclear to me.
I mean, assuming that it would not be clear to Andrew (and I think it is clear to Andrew), I we would get CCed on these emails and could immediately scream STOOOOOP :)
And until this would hit mm-stable, a bit more time would pass.
What's to prevent things getting merged out of order?
Fortunately, there are still people working here and not machines (at least, that's what I hope).
And do people 'just have to remember' to resend?
Yes, in this case Nico wants to get his stuff upstream and must drive it once the dependencies are met IMHO.
If there's a requirement related to the ordering of these series it really has to be expressed very clearly.
Jup. I'll note that for now there was no strict rule what to tag as RFC and what not that I know of. Of course, if people send broken, half-implemented, untested ... crap, it should *clearly* be RFC.
People should be spelling out dependencies in any case (especially for non-RFC versions) clearly.
I'll note that even if there would be a rule, I'm afraid we don't have a good place to document it (and not sure if people would find it or even try finding it ...) :/
A big problem is when some subsystems have their own rules for how to handle such things. That causes major pain for contributors ...