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

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>]

Em Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:24:24 -0400
"Theodore Tso" <tytso@mit.edu> escreveu:

> On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 02:03:13PM +0200, Greg KH wrote:

> The current baseline is that the media subsystem, networking, or BPF
> maintainer's decide what features to accept and who they will accept
> pull requests from.  

On media, we typically place things that deserve more discussion under
staging. We did that for stateful decoders and encoders, for instance.
The same was done for stateless codecs. It means that any drivers written
to use such features also go to staging. Not always possible, but
something like that IMO serves to signalize to users, distro-maintainers
and the maintainers of such feature that, while we're ok to have it
being tested, we're yet seeing issues that need more discussions and/or
fixes.


> The same us true all the way up the hierarchy
> maintainer tree up to Linus.  What is the alternative that we could
> use?  That some democratic voting procedure, or some kind of core team
> would stick their oar into making this decision?  I'm not sure that
> would be an improvement; in fact, IMHO, it will very likely be
> significantly worse.

Agreed. It is really hard to see when problems will arise, specially
in cases like this.

Thanks,
Mauro