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 <ty...@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 http://blog.ffwll.ch
