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

Rob Landley
2002-01-30T01:39:54Z

On Tuesday 29 January 2002 06:50 pm, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Rob Landley wrote:
>
> > Ah. So being listed in the maintainers list doesn't mean someone is
> > actually a maintainer it makes sense to forward patches to?
>
> Sure it does.
>
> It just doesn't mean that they should send stuff to _me_.
>
> Did you not understand my point about scalability?

I was asking for clarification.

> I can work with a
> limited number of people, and those people can work with _their_ limited
> number of people etc etc.

I.E. a tree structure.

> The MAINTAINERS file is _not_ a list of people I work with on a daily
> basis. In fact, I don't necessarily even recognize the names of all those
> people.
>
> Let's take an example. Let's say that you had a patch for ppp. You'd send
> the patch to Paul Mackerras. He, in turn, would send his patches to David
> Miller (who knows a hell of a lot better what it's all about than I do).
> And he in turn sends them to me.
>
> They are both maintainers. That doesn't mean that I necessarily work with
> every maintainer directly.

Okay, so there's a tree of maintainers, and some maintainers seem unaware
that they should be sending their patches to other maintainers rather than
directly to you?

Does this seem like a valid assessment of at least part of the problem?

> Why? Because having hundreds of people emailing me _obviously_ doesn't
> scale. Never has, never will. It may work over short timeperiods wih lots
> of energy, but it obviously isn't a stable setup.

Well at least we agree on something. :)

> Linus

Rob