Re: On community influencing (was Re: [PATCH v8 2/2] rust: add dma coherent allocator abstraction.)

Simona Vetter
2025-02-20T16:24:07Z

On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 08:20:52PM +1000, David Airlie wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 9, 2025 at 6:48 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Feb 07, 2025 at 06:16:38AM -0600, Dr. Greg wrote:
> > >
> > > The all powerful sub-system maintainer model works well if the big
> > > technology companies can employ omniscient individuals in these roles,
> > > but those types are a bit hard to come by.
> >
> > I'll let you in a secret. The maintainers are not "all-powerfui". We
> > are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code to be
> > maintainable and high quality. Like most leaders of volunteer
> > organization, whether it is the Internet Engineerint Task Force (the
> > standards body for the Internet), we actually have very little power.
> > We can not *command* people to work on retiring technical debt, or to
> > improve testing infrastructure, or work on some particular feature
> > that we'd very like for our users.
>
> Just as a courtesy to others can we not use the "thin blue line"
> analogy in this community, it has had some bad connotation thrown on
> it in the US context over the past few years, and I'd rather not as a
> maintainer be aligned with current connotation/interpretations of it,
> despite having family involved in our local force.

Agreed. I dropped a bit the ball on this, because at first I thought this
was only posted on part of the thread that wasn't cc'ed to dri-devel - I
can't pick a fight with the kernel community at large for everything that
happens. And then I let Dave handle this, because I couldn't come up with
anything that's not a nuclear table flip. 2 weeks later I'm still not
better, so let me instead express positively what kind of maintainership I
strive for by linking to an old talk of mine:

https://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/01/maintainers-dont-scale.html

> I'm open to suggestions for any better analogies.

Better analogy aside, I fundamentally disagree with understanding
maintainership as a gatekeeper role that exists to keep the chaos out. My
goal is to help build a community where people enjoy collaborating, and
then gtfo so I don't hinder them. I think the talk I linked above is
holding up quite well even years later, but the last part really embodies
that idea, so let me just quote that:

Be a Steward, Not a Lord

I think one of key advantages of open source is that people stick
around for a very long time. Even when they switch jobs or move
around. Maybe the usual “for life” qualifier isn’t really a great
choice, since it sounds more like a mandatory sentence than something
done by choice. What I object to is the “dictator” part, since if your
goal is to grow a great community and maybe reach world domination,
then you as the maintainer need to serve that community. And not that
the community serves you.

Cheers, Sima
--
Simona Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation