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

Daniel Phillips
2002-01-29T23:49:07Z

On January 29, 2002 02:19 pm, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> So the kernel maintainership becomes a network of maintainers. Then
> we only have to understand the routing protocols. Currently the
> routing tables appear to have Linus as the default route. As there
> are currently kernel subsystems that do not have a real maintainer, it
> may reasonable to have a misc maintainer. Who looks after the
> orphaned code, rejects/ignores patches for code that does have
> active maintainers, and looks for people to be maintainers of the
> orphaned code.
>
> The key is having enough human to human protocol that there is someone
> besides Linus you can send your code to. Or at least when there isn't
> people are looking for someone.
>
> Free Software obtains a lot of it's value by many people scratching an
> itch and fixing a little bug, or adding a little feature, sending the
> code off and then they go off to something else. We need to have the
> maintainer routing protocol clear enough, and the maintainer coverage
> good enough so we can accumulate most of the bug fixes from the fly by
> night hackers.
>
> So does anyone have any good ideas about how to build up routing
> tables? And almost more importantly how to make certain we have good
> maintainer coverage over the entire kernel?

Yes, we should cc our patches to a patchbot:

patches-2.5@kernel.org -> goes to linus
patches-2.4@kernel.org -> goes to marcello
patches-usb@kernel.org -> goes to gregkh, regardless of 2.4/2.5
etc.

The vast sea of eyeballs will do the rest. A web interface would be a nice
bonus, but 'patch sent and seen to be sent, to whom, when, what, why' is the
essential ingredient.

--
Daniel