Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin

Rob Landley
2002-01-30T21:02:28Z

On Wednesday 30 January 2002 07:49 am, Matthew D. Pitts wrote:
> Chris,
>
> Thank you for saying this... I have things I would like do/add to the
> kernel and I am not sure who to send them to.

No, if you're not a maintainer then you still send them to the maintainer in
the MAINTAINERS file.

The interesting question is, who does THAT maintainer send them to. (We seem
to be heading for a four-tiered system, with Linus at the top, a dozen or so
lieutenants under him, and then the specific maintainers under them. With
individual developers submitting patches being the fourth tier. Patches go
from developer, to maintainer, to lieutenant, to linus.)

This doesn't sound like a bad thing for scalability reasons, and should also
help address the "I sent my patch directly to linus a dozen times and I
didn't hear back" problem.

The problem right now is a lot of the maintainers don't seem to know who
their corresponding lieutenant is. We're still waiting for clarification
from Linus...

> Also, is there presently a maintainer for Supermount? If not, I would be
> willing to pick it up for 2.5.x, as it is one of the things I want to work
> on.

I didn't spot one in MAINTAINERS. The email at the top of "mount.h" says:

> * Author: Marco van Wieringen <mvw@planets.elm.net>

So that might be a good person to ask. Of course who knows how old that
email address is... :)

> Matthew D. Pitts

Rob