Re: [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Adding more formality around feature inclusion and ejection

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 09:09:04AM +0100, James Bottomley wrote:
> So what I saw is that as developers exercised this and effectively
> disengaged unless directly attacked, it pretty much became all on Linus
> because no-one was left in the chain. This is precisely where I think
> we could do with an alternative mechanism.

You are implying here that we all just "ran away" and left Linus to hold
the bag here, which is NOT the case at all.  This specific issue has
been discussed to death in a lot of different threads, public and
private with lots of people involved and none of that would have been
any different had we had some sort of "process document" ahead of time.

So I don't think that attempting to codify the very rare occurances like
this is going to really help out much, given that they are all unique to
their time/place/subsystem based on our past history like this.

> > Now, the above is inherently very messy.  But fortunately, it's only
> > happened once in thirty five years, and before we propose to put some
> > kind of mechanism in place, we need to make sure that the side
> > effects of that mechanism don't end up making things worse off.
> 
> Well, what we ended up with is one person in the chain (Linus), no
> actual decision except a failed pull request and nothing actually said
> which has lead to a raft of internet speculation.

It's not our job to quell "internet speculation", sorry.  Just because
we normally work in public for almost everything, doesn't mean that some
things can't be done in private as well.  And again, just because you
haven't seen a public decision doesn't mean that there hasn't been one
made :)

sorry,

greg k-h