Stepping down as maintainer

Stepping down as maintainer

[Kalle Valo]

Hi everyone,

I'm stepping down from all my maintainer roles. My first commit
feed9bab7b14 ("spi: omap2_mcspi PIO RX fix") to the kernel was back in
2008 for v2.6.24 so I have been here for a long time. Thank you everyone
who I have worked with, there are too many to list here.

Jeff continues to maintain ath10k, ath11k and ath12k drivers so they are
unaffected. But for the wireless driver maintainer (drivers/net/wireless/)
there is no replacement at the moment. If anyone is interested, please
do let Johannes and me know.

Kalle

Re: Stepping down as maintainer

[John W. Linville]

On Tue, 2025-01-28 at 11:20 +0200, Kalle Valo wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm stepping down from all my maintainer roles. My first commit

Well, my friend, I suppose the time has come for you to move on to
something else? I truly hope that something exciting and rewarding
awaits you!

You have done a great job in this maintainer role, and I am very
certain that you will be missed. Few people realize how thankless such
a role can be, but I do. I hope you will now have some some time to
enjoy your sauna as you consider what comes next for you.

Thanks for the job you have done.

Terveisin!

John
-- 
John W. Linville	Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville@tuxdriver.com		might be all we have.  Be ready.

Re: Stepping down as maintainer

[Dave Taht]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2025 at 7:18 AM John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2025-01-28 at 11:20 +0200, Kalle Valo wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I'm stepping down from all my maintainer roles. My first commit
>
> Well, my friend, I suppose the time has come for you to move on to
> something else? I truly hope that something exciting and rewarding
> awaits you!

I didn´t know John was still on the list! Hi John! I have enjoyed your
return to retro-computing elsewhere.

>
> You have done a great job in this maintainer role, and I am very
> certain that you will be missed. Few people realize how thankless such
> a role can be, but I do. I hope you will now have some some time to
> enjoy your sauna as you consider what comes next for you.

I too, thank you for your service in this role, and hope you find
something rewarding to do.

>
> Thanks for the job you have done.
>
> Terveisin!
>
> John
> --
> John W. Linville        Someday the world will need a hero, and you
> linville@tuxdriver.com          might be all we have.  Be ready.
>
>


-- 
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Re: Stepping down as maintainer

[Jakub Kicinski]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2025 11:20:26 +0200 Kalle Valo wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm stepping down from all my maintainer roles. My first commit
> feed9bab7b14 ("spi: omap2_mcspi PIO RX fix") to the kernel was back in
> 2008 for v2.6.24 so I have been here for a long time. Thank you everyone
> who I have worked with, there are too many to list here.

Thank you for all the hard work over the years, Kalle!

You will certainly be missed

Re: Stepping down as maintainer

[Emmanuel Grumbach]

Hi Kalle,

On Tue, Jan 28, 2025 at 5:18 PM John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2025-01-28 at 11:20 +0200, Kalle Valo wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I'm stepping down from all my maintainer roles. My first commit
>
> Well, my friend, I suppose the time has come for you to move on to
> something else? I truly hope that something exciting and rewarding
> awaits you!
>
> You have done a great job in this maintainer role, and I am very
> certain that you will be missed. Few people realize how thankless such
> a role can be, but I do. I hope you will now have some some time to
> enjoy your sauna as you consider what comes next for you.
>
> Thanks for the job you have done.
>

I think we met only once in Seville in ... 2016..

I also would like to take a few moments to thank you for the work you've
done for us all. Just like for many areas in life, we take things for granted
and only when there is a change we sometimes become more attentive to
what people have done for so many years without being recognized enough.

Good luck and I hope you'll enjoy the ride of your next adventure!

John, I think the last mail I got from you was when you stepped down... I assume
that the equipment that was considered then state of the art is now under heavy
development as part of your vintage hobby? ;)

Re: Stepping down as maintainer

[Johannes Berg]

Hi Kalle, all,

> I'm stepping down from all my maintainer roles. My first commit
> feed9bab7b14 ("spi: omap2_mcspi PIO RX fix") to the kernel was back in
> 2008 for v2.6.24 so I have been here for a long time. Thank you everyone
> who I have worked with, there are too many to list here.

First and foremost, let me add my thanks to the list here. We've worked
together for many years on wireless now and I appreciate that greatly,
personally and also in the role you've played in shaping wireless, be it
through the reviews directly, or the more indirect things like sharing
the tree maintenance etc. Thank you!

This is also an opportunity to thank Qualcomm for sponsoring your work
here. Certainly I'd expect they also got a lot of value out of it, but
we the community definitely got a lot, so thank you Qualcomm!

> Jeff continues to maintain ath10k, ath11k and ath12k drivers so they are
> unaffected. But for the wireless driver maintainer (drivers/net/wireless/)
> there is no replacement at the moment. If anyone is interested, please
> do let Johannes and me know.

I'll be honest and say that I did delay my reply to see if anyone would
speak up, but in the short term I really didn't expect anyone to step
up. We're pretty niche in wireless, after all :)

There's obviously reluctance of netdev picking up any wireless related
activity, and that would anyway be impractical if cfg80211 and/or
mac80211 were to remain separate. There's also a clear separation of the
lists, and given the volumes involved I think that's likely better for
everyone.

In the short term at least, I therefore expect that I will (need to) be
the custodian of the wireless trees. And I say "custodian" rather than
"maintainer" quite intentionally, because I cannot really take on the
role as you've filled it in the past. Shoes a few sizes too big, I
guess.


So as the wireless community, I think we will need to come to terms with
the fact that our workflow and processes will change now, and we'll
invariably have to take on some new work. In some ways, netdev has
already undergone such a transformation in the past, with
 * maintenance shared across more people (to some extent),
 * a lot more emphasis on reviewers _other_ than the maintainers, and
 * automation to take care of rote things.

I'm not sure we will be able to find (trusted) people willing to share
the maintenance with in the short term, but the other two things seem
entirely manageable in the short term. I'm already checking if I can get
(interim) automation set up in the short term, with a more permanent
setup, independent of myself or hopefully any company, to come later.

As for reviews, I suppose that'll be a new thing in the wireless world
where pretty much everyone (with few exceptions) works in their driver
niche. I would think that was also the case for Ethernet in the past
though, where now we see "cross-vendor" Reviewed-by tags on many
patches, even ones specific to other drivers. This is where we should
get to, to distribute reviews across more people. For those of you who
may not have seen, Jakub also publishes statistics about that, e.g.
https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20250121200710.19126f7d@kernel.org/

Hopefully then over time we'll see where things fall, and find one or
multiple people to share the tree maintenance with again. Bus factor and
all that.


However, that's only *my* vision for how we continue to maintain the
wireless tree going from here. I'm open to other suggestions (though
pre-emptively reject the suggestion that "every driver has their own
maintainer and that's good enough...")


Thanks for reading this far, and thanks again Kalle! :-)

johannes


PS: I'll update patchwork auto-delegation accordingly soon, just have to
remember when I have enough time to click all the slow buttons there