Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S265172AbUATHP5 (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 Jan 2004 02:15:57 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S265225AbUATHP5 (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 Jan 2004 02:15:57 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:2702 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S265172AbUATHPy (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 Jan 2004 02:15:54 -0500 Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 23:15:47 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: "Justin T. Gibbs" cc: James Bottomley , Xose Vazquez Perez , Linux Kernel , Tosatti , linux-scsi Subject: Re: AIC7xxx kernel problem with 2.4.2[234] kernels In-Reply-To: <3942145408.1074564149@aslan.btc.adaptec.com> Message-ID: References: <400BDC85.8040907@wanadoo.es> <1074532919.1895.32.camel@mulgrave> <3747775408.1074537497@aslan.btc.adaptec.com> <1074559838.2078.1.camel@mulgrave> <3942145408.1074564149@aslan.btc.adaptec.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1644 Lines: 41 On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Justin T. Gibbs wrote: > > Does the maintainer have the ability to veto changes that harm the > code they maintain? Nope. Nobody has that right. Even _I_ don't veto changes that the right people push (my motto: "everybody is wrong sometimes: when enough people complain, even I am wrong"). In particular, maintainers of "conceptually higher" generally always have priority. If Al Viro says a filesystem is doing something wrong from a VFS standpoint, then that filesystem is broken - regardless of whether the filesystem maintainer agrees or not. Because the VFS layer requirements trump any low-level filesystem issues. But perhaps more importantly (and it's the reason even _I_ don't have the right, regardless of how high up in the maintainership chain I am), nobody has veto-power over anything. That's to keep people honest: nobody should _ever_ think that they are "in control", and that nobody else can replace them. In other words: maintainership is not ownership. It's a stewardship. End result: maintainership is a nasty and mostly unthankful job. It doesn't really give many privileges, and most of what it does is just have people complain to you about bugs. The satisfaction is there, of course, but And finally: maintainership is largely about working with people. There's some code in there too, but people tend to be more important. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/