On Thu, 2025-08-21 at 15:15 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:44:07 +0100 > James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > I share my scripts and explain how to do a pull request. How to > > > use linux-next and what to and more importantly, what not to send > > > during during the -rc releases. > > > > I'm not sure that covers it. As I read the situation it was more > > about how you work with others when there are things in the kernel > > you'd like to introduce or change to support your feature. Hence > > it's really about working with rather than against the community. > > What I'm suggesting is to have a program to help newcomers that are > taking on a maintainer role. This program can not only teach what > needs to be done to be a maintainer, but also vet the people that are > coming into our ecosystem. If there's a lot of push back from the > individual on how to interact with the community, then that > individual can be denied becoming a maintainer. As I said, I think this is a good idea, it just wouldn't have solved the problems we saw. The initial pull request has a huge thread which, when summarized, pretty much predicted the issues that were seen. Although he went into MAINTAINERS with an R tag, Brian Foster did attempt to act as a buffer, something which I don't think we've thanked Brian for enough, but something which ultimately failed probably due to lack of empowerment. > > > I'm sure others have helped developers become maintainers as > > > well. Perhaps we should get together and come up with a formal > > > way to become a maintainer? Because honestly, it's currently done > > > by trial and error. I think that should change. > > > > That wouldn't hurt, but that problem that I see is that some fairly > > drastic action has been taken on what can be characterised as a > > whim, so I think we need some formality around how and when this > > happens. > > If it was policy for Kent to work with a mentor before he could send > patches directly to Linus, would this have uncovered the issues > before they became as large as they had become? Well, no, the thread I pointed to as part of this proposal pretty much predicted what actually happened. So the problems were known ahead of time and didn't need to be discovered, we just needed a better mitigation mechanism (which a supervision program could form part of). Regards, James
