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Date:   Tue, 13 Jul 2021 20:14:04 +0000
From:   Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] vboxsf fixes for 5.14-1
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On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 12:15:13PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 3:45 AM Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Linus, sorry for sending this directly through you, instead of going
> > through some other tree, but trying to get this upstream through the
> > linux-fsdevel list / patch-review simply is not working.
> 
> Well, the filesystem maintainer sending their patches to me as a pull
> request is actually the norm rather than the exception when it comes
> to filesystems.
> 
> It's a bit different for drivers, but that's because while we have
> multiple filesystems, we have multiple _thousand_ drivers, so on the
> driver side I really don't want individual driver maintainers to all
> send me their individual pull requests - that just wouldn't scale.
> 
> So for individual drivers, we have subsystem maintainers, but for
> individual filesystems we generally don't.
> 
> (When something then touches the *common* vfs code, that's a different
> thing - but something like this vboxsf thing this pull request looks
> normal to me).

To elaborate a bit - there's one case when I want it to go through
vfs.git, and that's when there's an interference between something
going on in vfs.git and the work done in filesystem.  Other than
that, I'm perfectly fine with maintainer sending pull request directly
to Linus (provided that I hadn't spotted something obviously wrong
in the series, of course, but that's not "I want it to go through
vfs.git" - that's "I don't want it in mainline until such and such
bug is resolved").