Confused about which branch to patch against

[James Browning]

Hi all,

After reading through the kernel documentation about submitting pathces,
and reading through the kernel newbies guide to submitting patches, I
still have some confusion.

Should I be doing all of my patching against linux-next as opposed to
the mainline tree? I tried submitting a patch to some typos I found on
the mainline tree, but they were rejected because they had already been
fixed in linux-next. 

I guess I dont really understand what patches become part of the next
mainline rc-x tree, and which patches become part of linux-next (which
from what I understand, doesn't get merged until the next merge window when the current kernel version is finished being stabalized).

Also, if I patch something in the linux-next tree, do I need to specify
which tree it is when I send the patch the maintainers?

Thank you for your help,
James Browning