Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: add Josh Law as reviewer for library code

[Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>]

On 3/13/26 9:51 AM, Josh Law wrote:
> 13 Mar 2026 15:48:32 Lorenzo Stoakes (Oracle) <ljs@kernel.org>:
> 
>> +cc David for mention
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 04:33:49PM +0100, Christian Brauner wrote:
>>> - first patch Feb 28 under pseudonym "techyguyperplexable", switched to "Josh Law" only when Andrew required a real name
>>>   in https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260228114939.de7d44de38d907a9b6632480@linux-foundation.org
>>> - 142+ emails in ~2 weeks ? 37 patches in a single day (Mar 1)
>>> - All trivial/cosmetic ? SPDX headers, comment grammar, spacing, const qualifiers. Zero bug fixes, zero new functionality
>>> - Carpet-bombed multiple subsystems ? lib/, arm64/, staging/, input/, etc.
>>> - within 1 week of first-ever patch, submitted MAINTAINERS: add Josh Law as reviewer for library code covering all of lib/ (locking.c, iov_iter.c, rhashtable.c, etc.)
>>> - Email identity mismatch ? From: hlcj1234567@gmail.com, Signed-off-by: objecting@objecting.org
>>> - Formatting problems ? top-posting, line length violations, patches not applying cleanly
>>>
>>> So I mean, one week to Reviewer. Even if we're being very generous here,
>>> we need to do a lot more due diligence going forward. We can't just hand
>>> out core components like this and risking our reputation and security
>>> posture.
>>
>> Thanks! Agree absolutely that we need to be careful about this. Jia Tan should
>> be instructive.
>>
>> Josh - there's nothing personal here to be clear, this is a question of
>> procedure and caution.
>>
>> More broadly I think we should avoid assigning new people to catch-all
>> categories anyway unless they are well established enough to be involved with
>> _everything_ the catch-all covers.
>>
>> For instance adding people to the mm/* other than perhaps... David ;) would be
>> crazy.
>>
>> Also - Andrew - I think for cases where you are the only maintainer but it
>> impacts others, you should seek acks proportional to the scope the MAINTAINERS
>> entry spans - in this case that'd be a _lot_ of people - but that only
>> underlines that we shouldn't be updating such entries anyway.
>>
>> In fact - can we just do away with catch-all's and just make sure MAINTAINERS
>> entries are established for everything?
>>
>> I have ground to stand on for this as I personally did it for mm, although we do
>> still have a catch-all (not sure if necessary any more?)
>>
>> In the case of lib/ a quick fix could be to figure out which files are not
>> covered by other MAINTAINERS entries and adding them all to what is currently
>> the catch-all?
>>
>> Cheers, Lorenzo
> 
> Well, it's already been merged into linux-next, I will keep constantly

That doesn't matter, lots of things end up temporarily in -next and
disappear before it ever sees upstream.

> trying to prove myself as a trusted figure in the community, and I am
> learning new things every day about the rules, and when you talk about
> me making "trivial" patches, I also made some medium sized bug fixes,
> yeah my start was just "janitor" code, but I will try to prove myself,

I have to agree with Christian/Lorenzo/et al here. This is not how it
works. You prove yourself by doing quality work, and then and only then
does it become official. Adding someone after 1 week of a bunch of
trivial patches is literally crazy, imho.

-- 
Jens Axboe