Re: Adrian Bunk is now taking over the 2.6.16-stable branch

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>]

On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 09:52:34PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> Greg didn't "elect" anyone, Adrian volunteered to maintain something
> that had been dropped by the -stable developers and no one else was
> going to maintain.

Did you ever call for a maintainer list of volunteers?

To me an official 2.6.16-stable in the hands of the only guy who
proposed himself as maintainer, sounds worse than no stable tree at
all. People won't know anymore if to run Greg's 2.6.18-stable or
2.6.16-stable.

If a 2.6-real-stable tree has to happen because 2.6-stable is not
really stable/trustable enough, then give it up with your
2.6.18-stable and start doing 2.7 and leave 2.6 in the hands of
somebody else.

An official kernel needs a critical mass to have a value, it's simply
a wasted effort to open yet another official tree that will actually
fragment the "production" userbase even more.

If 2.6.18-stable is sustainable with the current model, with the
distro folks being the only ones forking off a real-stable tree, then
you should drop 2.6.16-stable. If instead it's 2.6.18-stable that is
not good enough for production usage and people really needs
2.6.16-stable, you should open 2.7, and not fragment the userbase like
this.

I think it would be great to have the users choosing their preferred
maintainer to end the era of maintainers being decided by other
maintainers like you actually did. A simple website on kernel.org can
achieve it, where users can registers for voting and the maintainers
willing to maintain 2.6-stable can registers themself too. That's at
least less random than the current status if what you said above is
true and if 2.6.16-stable is meant to reach any critical mass.