Re: [ANN] I will stop applying driver patches

[Alessio Ferri <alessio.ferri@mythread.it>]

Hi Johannes,

in defense of the people who "send patches to decades-old drivers":
Those drivers are incomplete/buggy/a pain to deal with, usually because
of the poor vendor support or totally missing documentation (no need to
name names). 
A lot of people (I am one of them) have had to deal with them for ages,
with great suffering and little hope of ever fixing the situation,
because of missing developers interested in fixing them / no
documentation to start from / no time to reverse the whole thing.
Finally today, with some assistance from an LLM, one could hope to have
working hardware with Linux, or at least try to; it seems then natural
to send patches upstream for review, instead of keeping them private.

Sometimes, even with an LLM helping, the work takes months.
Sometimes, the contributor has no idea of what they are doing, and
I get why this is a problem, after all maintainers are not review
machines.
But, there has to be a middle ground, maybe a small overall quota per
merge window would push people to self-review their own work more
carefully. That would avoid creating perverse incentives, like
forcing people to give reviews, with the risk of having people give away
random Reviewed-by tags just to reach the required number.

Best regards
Alessio