I just had to forward this to the group.
I subscribe to the linux-scsi kernel email list, to keep tabs on developments.
The email below came through from Linux Torvalds, maintainer of the Linux
kernel. Contrast his attitude with that of many other leaders and you can
see one of the reasons why Linux continues to grow and improve.
Alan
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Re: AIC7xxx kernel problem with 2.4.2[234] kernels
Date: Tuesday 20 January 2004 12:15 am
From: Linus Torvalds <
torvalds@osdl.org>
To: "Justin T. Gibbs" <
gibbs@scsiguy.com>
Cc: James Bottomley <
James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com>, Xose Vazquez Perez
<
xose@wanadoo.es>, Linux Kernel <
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, Tosatti
<
marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com>, linux-scsi <
linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org>
On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Justin T. Gibbs wrote:
> Does the maintainer have the ability to veto changes that harm the
> code they maintain?
Nope. Nobody has that right.
Even _I_ don't veto changes that the right people push (my motto:
"everybody is wrong sometimes: when enough people complain, even I am
wrong").
In particular, maintainers of "conceptually higher" generally always have
priority. If Al Viro says a filesystem is doing something wrong from a VFS
standpoint, then that filesystem is broken - regardless of whether the
filesystem maintainer agrees or not. Because the VFS layer requirements
trump any low-level filesystem issues.
But perhaps more importantly (and it's the reason even _I_ don't have the
right, regardless of how high up in the maintainership chain I am), nobody
has veto-power over anything. That's to keep people honest: nobody should
_ever_ think that they are "in control", and that nobody else can replace
them.
In other words: maintainership is not ownership. It's a stewardship.
End result: maintainership is a nasty and mostly unthankful job. It
doesn't really give many privileges, and most of what it does is just have
people complain to you about bugs. The satisfaction is there, of course,
but
And finally: maintainership is largely about working with people.
There's some code in there too, but people tend to be more important.
Linus
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