Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] community management/subsystem governance

[Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>]

Hi Linus,

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 9:08 AM Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 2:08 PM Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@bootlin.com> wrote:
> > If there's a very significant part of the work that is
> > done by the maintainer of a given subsystem, and that there is a
> > single maintainer for that subsystem, what will happen when that
> > maintainer decides to stop contributing for some reason?
> >
> > All the knowledge they built, experience they got (including at
> > reviewing) is gone, possibly forever, and there's no one to pick up
> > the subsystem, and the code is left to rot.
>
> Unfortunately this is what happened when David Brownell
> passed away. His passing had a long-standing and serious
> impact on the quality of the subsystems he helped creating.
>
> GPIO was left unmaintained and patches were coming in
> and merged by Andrew Morton, as is default (and it is a
> good thing that we don't just stop merging code, that would
> probably have been even worse). Most of it was fine.
>
> However one piece that got merged at this turbulent time
> was the GPIO sysfs ABI which in my opinion
> was not very nice. The main problem was that it exposed
> kernel internals (the global GPIO numberspace) to the whole
> world and made them semi-ABI which is really tricky to
> maintain in the long run. It probably didn't seem like a big
> problem at the time and GPIO was seen as obscure. But
> it has created a major maintenance headache, and I imagine
> that an active maintainer would have come up with something
> a bit different.

While we do miss David Brownell, I think there are some errors in your
timeline. Commit d8f388d8dc8d4f36 ("gpio: sysfs interface") was authored
by David himself.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds