Re: Has Linux Development Become Too Political? (Score 5)

[apologies for over-the-head reply, folks]

Has Linux development become too political, bottlenecked and ego-driven? Witness the recent exchange between Hans Reiser, of ReiserFS fame, and Alexander Viro (VFS maintainer) on Linux-Kernel; Hans, and others, were griping about Viro refusing patches and ideas on principle, and Viro keeps telling people to shut up and read the code.

Sigh... Folks, what about getting the story straight? 1. Hans (or anyone in Reiserfs team, for that matter) did not submit any patches _to_ VFS. The only piece that modifies VFS itself is, as all sides agree, ugly but fixable and did not cause any objections. 2. Patch contained a large chunk of code that obviously was not reviewed for a couple of years, which is a bad thing, especially for interface code. Again, all sides seem to agree on that. 3. "Others" in that context probably means Richard with devfs stuff? Well, the problem with devfs was that it did _not_ change VFS. Instead it tried to do everything in a filesystem and that gave a huge bunch of races and major ugliness. Richard refused (search l-k archives) to move the relevant parts of changes into VFS. Many times. After being asked to do that, since that would make things much cleaner. 4. Ideas are good when the author knows what he is talking about. In particular, if the idea starts with "let's make this to do that" it would better be supported by understanding how "this" currently works or willingness to redo it completely and make sure that nothing breaks. If it is there - fine, things get discussed (tons of examples in archives). If not - too bad. 5. Reading the code is definitely useful thing - especially if you want to change that code. No? 6. Rumors about the need to submit stuff through me are greatly exaggregated (read: provably are pure BS). Discussing the stuff on maillists _is_ needed. _Submitting_ it to me (or anybody other than Linus) is not. 7. During 2.3 there had been several large changes of VFS. If you are claiming that Andrea, Ingo, Stephen and I are the same person... <shudder>
As for the "external pressure" - get a grip. Really. As far as I'm concerned this stuff is done on technical merits. You can't build a pressure sufficient to make me act against that. And I mean it - I consider self-respect more valuable than having a paid job. YMMV. You can't force anyone of us to do what you like. You can learn the kernel and start submitting patches that would be acceptable to Linus on their technical merits. That's how it works. I would be glad to see anyone joining the VFS/fs work. Learn it and go ahead. Or keep wanking - nobody can deprive you of that right.