Re: [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Adding more formality around feature inclusion and ejection

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>]

Em Thu, 21 Aug 2025 23:21:38 +0100
Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> escreveu:

> On Thu, Aug 21, 2025 at 04:34:07PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > There is the saying that "bad facts make bad law", and the specifics
> > of this most recent controversy are especially challenging.  I would
> > urge caution before trying to create a complex set of policies and
> > mechanim when we've only had one such corner case in over 35 years.  
> 
> Well. we may have dodged a few bullets before now.  Just in filesystems,
> I can think of Hans Reiser, Jeff Merkey, Boaz Harrosh, Daniel Phillips
> (no, i'm not saying any of the others did anything as heinous as Hans,
> but they were all pretty disastrous in their own ways).

There are other cases as well: there was a media driver maintainer that
did pretty bad things, including physical threats against other
maintainers. I even got a report that he did threat to life another
maintainer who complained he would be violating GPL copyrights.

> I don't think we can necessarily generalise from these examples to,
> say, Lustre.  That has its own unique challenges, and I don't think that
> making them do more paperwork will be helpful.

Agreed. I don't think those few examples have much in common:
each had different types of issues. So, I don't think any text
would be enough to cover such cases, as they're punctual.

Probably the only thing that could be more effective would be to have
an e-signed CLA for the ones which become maintainers.


Thanks,
Mauro