From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.35]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 1EE1DBE0 for ; Fri, 14 Sep 2018 07:39:51 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-vs1-f66.google.com (mail-vs1-f66.google.com [209.85.217.66]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id A5C2513A for ; Fri, 14 Sep 2018 07:39:50 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mail-vs1-f66.google.com with SMTP id x198-v6so196764vsx.12 for ; Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:39:50 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <8412864.7ztUKcXNNC@avalon> <2019489.6joTqyUi4Z@avalon> <20180911124423.GM2494@piout.net> <20180912182343.GI2760@piout.net> <20180913120811.oilaweiun3z4l5wo@flea> In-Reply-To: From: Geert Uytterhoeven Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 09:39:36 +0200 Message-ID: To: Linus Walleij Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Cc: ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] community management/subsystem governance List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Hi Linus, On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 9:08 AM Linus Walleij wrote: > On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 2:08 PM Maxime Ripard 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