[B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

[B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

[Sven Eckelmann]

I cannot speak on behalf of the batman-adv developers due to conflicts
in the opinion about the ongoing development. The batman-adv module is
still maintained by Marek Lindner and Simon Wunderlich. Those are the
main persons behind the visions of batman-adv. Therefore, the state of
module hasn't changed.

Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
Cc: b.a.t.m.a.n@lists.open-mesh.org
---
Just as small background information:
https://lists.open-mesh.org/pipermail/b.a.t.m.a.n/2011-June/005020.html
expresses the same problems I have with the changes and I can honestly
not speak on behalf the developers when I my inner mind is against the
changes and I would only be an additional, unneeded barrier.

This decission was made in context of the changes which are on the
horizon. I personally don't know what is coming, but that many things
are changing in an incompatible way. I would like to leave here instead
to destroy some friendships.

 MAINTAINERS |    1 -
 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/MAINTAINERS b/MAINTAINERS
index dc2a7c8..9597832 100644
--- a/MAINTAINERS
+++ b/MAINTAINERS
@@ -1390,7 +1390,6 @@ F:	include/linux/backlight.h
 BATMAN ADVANCED
 M:	Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
 M:	Simon Wunderlich <siwu@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de>
-M:	Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
 L:	b.a.t.m.a.n@lists.open-mesh.org
 W:	http://www.open-mesh.org/
 S:	Maintained
-- 
1.7.5.3

Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

[David Miller]

From: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:13:03 +0200

> I cannot speak on behalf of the batman-adv developers due to conflicts
> in the opinion about the ongoing development. The batman-adv module is
> still maintained by Marek Lindner and Simon Wunderlich. Those are the
> main persons behind the visions of batman-adv. Therefore, the state of
> module hasn't changed.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
> Cc: b.a.t.m.a.n@lists.open-mesh.org

You have to be kidding me.

All of this effort was placed to get this thing merged into the
main tree, and then moved out of staging.

And now you're just going to give up and jump ship and take exactly
zero responsibility for that burdon you've placed upon us?

You make me feel like a real idiot for sticking around and maintaining
the Linux networking for more than 15 years.  Maybe 13 years ago I
should have stepped down just because I disagreed with a few other
people.

Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

[Sven Eckelmann]

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On Tuesday 21 June 2011 14:35:15 David Miller wrote:
> From: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
> Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:13:03 +0200
> 
> > I cannot speak on behalf of the batman-adv developers due to conflicts
> > in the opinion about the ongoing development. The batman-adv module is
> > still maintained by Marek Lindner and Simon Wunderlich. Those are the
> > main persons behind the visions of batman-adv. Therefore, the state of
> > module hasn't changed.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
> > Cc: b.a.t.m.a.n@lists.open-mesh.org
> 
> You have to be kidding me.

Thanks for the warm welcome :)

> All of this effort was placed to get this thing merged into the
> main tree, and then moved out of staging.

"Shooting the messenger" - I think that is the matching phrase. Just try to 
grep my name in the net/batman-adv/ and you will see it nowhere. The problem 
is that I am probably the most unimportant person in the whole project. But at 
least I was good enough to send some patches around which were accepted or 
made by other people. I was also not the person behind the whole Linux-merge 
thing, but only some kind of marionette.

> And now you're just going to give up and jump ship and take exactly
> zero responsibility for that burdon you've placed upon us?

This is your interpretation. I would say that I don't take zero responsibility 
for the stuff which is not yet part of the tree (of course still take 
responsibilities for the stuff with my name in it). I never said that 
completely run away, but that I am no longer the person which is send to the 
enemy general to bring bad news. Desertion to the enemy or bringing bad news - 
the end result for me is the same.

At least I tried to only do only one step backwards instead of running 
silently away in the night never to be seen again.

> You make me feel like a real idiot for sticking around and maintaining
> the Linux networking for more than 15 years.  Maybe 13 years ago I
> should have stepped down just because I disagreed with a few other
> people.

Sry, never wanted to say that it is bad to disagree with other people or that 
you are a bad person/maintainer.

Disagreeing with everyone else and pushing your opinion until the end against 
anybody makes the person a dictator (could be a good or bad one). Disagreeing 
with everyone and not being man enough to stand for it makes me a moron.

Maybe I am an incompetent idiot, but at least this time I stand behind my 
opinion. Please think everything bad about me, but not that I didn't try to 
explain my position instead of going into stealth mode (which would have been 
a lot easier solution).

thanks,
	Sven

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Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

[David Miller]

From: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:41:45 +0200

> On Tuesday 21 June 2011 14:35:15 David Miller wrote:
>> All of this effort was placed to get this thing merged into the
>> main tree, and then moved out of staging.
> 
> "Shooting the messenger" - I think that is the matching phrase. Just try to 
> grep my name in the net/batman-adv/ and you will see it nowhere.

It is everywhere as far as I am concerned, because you're the only person
actually keeping upstream maintained and in sync.

> The problem is that I am probably the most unimportant person in the
> whole project.

From my perspective, this is not true.  You are the most important
person.  And this is because the people writing the code obviously
don't care enough about upstream to do any merges themselves.  Yet
you do.

> But at least I was good enough to send some patches around which
> were accepted or made by other people. I was also not the person
> behind the whole Linux-merge thing, but only some kind of
> marionette.

When we agree to allow someone to merge something into the tree,
especially a significant piece of code like batman-adv, there are some
impressions we want to have beforehand.

And one such impression we want is that there is going to be someone
continuing to be active maintaing the code upstream, even after the
code is merged.

Otherwise we get "merge and run" scenerios.  As networking maintainer,
I've been burnt by this several times.

If you're the only person who had the energy and motivation to do the
merges of this code, then you're only person we know that can keep up
with the expectations we had when we agreed to merge the code.

If you step down, that trust has been broken, and we're left with a
rotting pile of poo in the tree because it's unlikely anyone else is
going to step up and keep things maintained upstream as you did.

Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

[Marek Lindner]

Hi,

> When we agree to allow someone to merge something into the tree,
> especially a significant piece of code like batman-adv, there are some
> impressions we want to have beforehand.
> 
> And one such impression we want is that there is going to be someone
> continuing to be active maintaing the code upstream, even after the
> code is merged.
> 
> Otherwise we get "merge and run" scenerios.  As networking maintainer,
> I've been burnt by this several times.
> 
> If you're the only person who had the energy and motivation to do the
> merges of this code, then you're only person we know that can keep up
> with the expectations we had when we agreed to merge the code.
> 
> If you step down, that trust has been broken, and we're left with a
> rotting pile of poo in the tree because it's unlikely anyone else is
> going to step up and keep things maintained upstream as you did.

believing that the batman-adv code base will not be kept in sync anymore is a 
bit premature at this point. David, you may not know this but the first person 
to handle the "upstream job" was Andrew Lunn. At a certain point he stepped 
down and Sven took over. Now, Sven decided to focus on other things and I am 
certain somebody else will take the job. If no one else volunteers I'll fill 
the gap.

Taking over Sven's position won't be easy as he did a very good job and passes 
on high expectations. Sven, thanks a lot for all your time and effort on this 
matter!

David, I hope you can excuse the bumpy way in which this fell onto you. A 
smooth transition would certainly have been better. We will try to work on 
that part in the future. 

Regards,
Marek

Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

[David Miller]

From: Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:16:03 +0200

> David, I hope you can excuse the bumpy way in which this fell onto you. A 
> smooth transition would certainly have been better. We will try to work on 
> that part in the future. 

Fair enough, I've applied the MAINTAINERS patch and thanks to Sven
for all of his hard work :-)

Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

[Sven Eckelmann]

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On Wednesday 22 June 2011 01:16:20 David Miller wrote:
> From: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
> Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:41:45 +0200
> 
> > On Tuesday 21 June 2011 14:35:15 David Miller wrote:
> >> All of this effort was placed to get this thing merged into the
> >> main tree, and then moved out of staging.
> > 
> > "Shooting the messenger" - I think that is the matching phrase. Just try
> > to grep my name in the net/batman-adv/ and you will see it nowhere.
> 
> It is everywhere as far as I am concerned, because you're the only person
> actually keeping upstream maintained and in sync.

That is more related to the fact that Mareks opinion on the topic is that only 
one person should be in responsible for the linux merging and this position 
should not be changed each time. And I understood the names in MAINTAINERS as 
the persons which feel responsible and are the right ones to contact to get 
something done (whether it is merging, submitting bug reports, asking for 
information, ...).

> > The problem is that I am probably the most unimportant person in the
> > whole project.
> 
> From my perspective, this is not true.  You are the most important
> person.  And this is because the people writing the code obviously
> don't care enough about upstream to do any merges themselves.  Yet
> you do.

I think that I have to adjust your perspective slightly. I would never say 
that Marek doesn't care about something. Yes, he never did a pull request, but 
he always comes up and try to give further insight when it was needed. He is 
currently the mastermind behind batman-adv and tries to keep everything 
together.

He already wrote you that he is willing to take over and I will assist him as 
good as I can (but not doing pull request anymore or giving statements whether 
a patch is good or bad for batman-adv/linux)

Just to give you a small overview about the stuff where currently work is done 
(as far as I know). More or less the complete protocol should be rewritten and 
many features should be added. You already got the first step when you merged 
the translation table and roaming changes [1]. Other topics seem to be:
 * multicast[2]
 * splitting OGMs[3] in ELP[4], OGM and something else
 * Adding support for an ARP protocol over distributed hash tables[5]
 * wireless network coding[7]
 * ap isolation
 * mesh wide minstrel
 * transmission quality calculated using the data from the wifi drivers along
   the path
 * redundancy bonding
 * ...

Every change needs some modifications to the packet format and may make it 
incompatible to the previous versions (some only add flags and some need to 
modify many things and even add new packet types). They already started to 
discuss[8] how they want to send those changes to you.

thanks,
	Sven


[1] https://lists.open-mesh.org/pipermail/b.a.t.m.a.n/2011-June/005010.html
[2] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/Multicast-ideas
[3] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/OGM
[4] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/ELP
[5] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/DAT
[6] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/MGO
[7] http://downloads.open-mesh.org/batman/misc/wbmv4-network_coding.avi
    (there is a document called "Inter-Flow Network Coding for Wireless Mesh
     Networks" about it, but I don't think that I am allowed to redistribute
     it)
[8] https://lists.open-mesh.org/pipermail/b.a.t.m.a.n/2011-June/005025.html

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