Re: BK kernel workflow

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 06:44:38PM +0200, Paolo Ciarrocchi wrote:
> I totally agree on the "beauty of Linux development" part of your statement,
> I don't 100% agree on your definition of maintainer.

I explicitly didn't define maintainer.  That's the beauty of Linux
development.  I've been around for more than a decade in the Linux kernel
and people come and people go.  People show up and prove themselves and
become more important because they _are_ more important.  Not because
they have the maintainer title.

Linus sets the tone on this one, he has always played it fairly harshly
in that he respects the work you did today.  What you did (or did not do)
yesterday isn't relevant.  One way to sum it up is "There is no tenure
in Linux kernel development".  You are useful as long as you are useful
and then you get pushed aside.  I don't always agree with this model,
I think it has chased away some useful people who felt like "Linus owed
them" but on the other hand it is extremely open to new useful people.

> There a few well defined maintainer in the community and those names
> are defined and written in the kernel documentation.
> So, I think that is moving target but we have a few stable and well
> know references.

Yeah but focussing on them is the wrong answer.  Who knew who Andrew
Morton was 5 years ago?  He's clearly one of the most important people
around today but tomorrow someone else may emerge.  No offense at all
intended towards Andrew, he's clearly kicking butt, I watch his trees,
the amount of work he does is astounding, if you aren't watching you
should be.  But the cool part of the process is that Andrew came out of
left field and became who he is.

I've worked at places where it was all about who you knew, that sort of
clubby old boy feeling, and new people had a very tough time breaking
into the system.  The Linus model is crushingly hard on people who
have paid their dues but have slowed down, that's the "no tenure" part,
but the good part is that you don't have to be anybody to be important.
You just need to be good.  All the rest is just talk.

> I'm not a kernel hacker at all so my comments will sound just silly to
> a lot of people involved in the development but as a user I'm
> sometimes "alarmed" by the lack of formality in the development
> process (see the naming wars),

I was interviewed by a guy at Business Week a few days ago about this
process and I tried to get the point across that there actually is
a process but it's more of a zen thing than something that managers
would like.

> Larry,
> thank you for your answer, I always appreciate having such a kind of
> open discussions with people that are really involved in the
> development.

Sadly, I'm not at all involved in the development other than as someone
who is trying to help indirectly.  BK is clearly helping, I think even
the BK license haters have finally admitted that, but I'm pretty much
out of the process.  I'm just like you, sitting on the sidelines admiring
what is going on. As Linus said in some mail to me a while back, I'm like
the guy who provides the lumber for the house raising.  No matter how much
I'd like to be a part of the house raising, I'm not, I'm just a vendor
providing some needed parts.
-- 
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Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com