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

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Fri, 2025-08-22 at 14:03 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> 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.

I didn't ask for a process document.  I was clear about what I was
asking for in the part of the email you cut in your reply.

> 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.

I didn't say it was.

>   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 :)

I get that in the current political climate transparency is taking a
back seat.  However, it does lie at the heart of the open in open
source so I think we should be making a bit more effort to be better.

Being transparent would have controlled (not quelled because there's
always conspiracy theorists) the internet speculation not because it
would make it someone's job but because it's simply a natural
consequence of doing the right thing.

Regards,

James