Re: [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Folios as a potential Kernel/Maintainers Summit topic?

Chris Mason
2021-09-16T22:28:02Z

> On Sep 16, 2021, at 1:15 PM, Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@gmail.com> wrote:
>

[ general agreement ]

> But more than the question of whether we write design docs up front, I frankly
> think we have a _broken_ culture with respect to supporting and enabling cross
> subsystem refactorings and improvements. Instead of collectively coming up with
> ideas for improvements, a lot of the discussions I see end up feeling like turf
> wars and bikeshedding where everyone has their pet idea they want the thing to
> be and no one is taking a step back and saying "look at this mess we created,
> how are we going to simplify and clean it up."
>
> And we have created some unholy messes, especially in MM land.
>

[ … ]

> It's like - seriously people, it's ok to create messes when we're doing new
> things and figuring them out for the first time, but we have to go back and
> clean up our messes or we end up with an unmaintainable Cthulian horror no one
> can untangle, and a lot of the MM code is just about that point.
>

You’ve been doing a lot of bridge building recently, so please don’t take this the wrong way. I think a key component of avoiding the turf wars is recognizing that we don’t need to make people feel shitty about their subsystem before we can convince them to improve it. We all have different priorities around what to improve, and we’ve all made compromises over the years. It’s enough to just be excited about how things can be better.

This email is hard to write because I’m hoping my own messages from earlier today fall into the category of being excited for improvements, but here we are.

-chris