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

Linus Torvalds
2025-02-07T18:33:47Z

On Fri, 7 Feb 2025 at 10:02, Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st> wrote:
>
> Meanwhile, for better or worse, much of Linux infra *is* centralized -
> for example, the mailing lists themselves, and a lot of the Git hosting.

The mailing lists are mostly on kernel.org, but the git hosting most
certainly is not centralized in any way.

The kernel.org git repositories used to be special in that I didn't
require signed tags for them, because I trusted the user maintenance.
But I was encouraging signed tags even back then, and once it got to
the point where most were signed anyway, I just made it a rule. So now
kernel.org isn't special even in that respect.

Now, kernel.org is very much _convenient_. And you see that in the
stats: of my pulls in the last year, 85% have been from kernel.org.
But that is very much because it is convenient, not because it's
centralized.

But that still leaves the 15% that aren't kernel.org.

Since I did the stats, in case anybody is interested, the top
non-kernel.org hosts for my pulls are github.com, git.samba.org,
gitlab.freedesktop.org, evilpiepirate.org, git.infradead.org and
git.lwn.net (and there's a handful of other ones in there).

(And while I did the stats just for *my* pulls, if you look at total
merges over-all, the non-korg repositories are actually at 20% - I
think my percentages are higher simply because I tend to pull from
mostly top-level maintainers, and those are even more likely to use a
kernel.org account).

More importtantly, not being centralized was very much a basic tenet
of git, so *if* git.kernel.org were to become problematic, it's very
easy to move git repositories anywhere else. Very much by design.

Linus