Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin

[Daniel Phillips]

On January 29, 2002 02:19 pm, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> So the kernel maintainership becomes a network of maintainers.  Then
> we only have to understand the routing protocols.  Currently the
> routing tables appear to have Linus as the default route.  As there
> are currently kernel subsystems that do not have a real maintainer, it
> may reasonable to have a misc maintainer.  Who looks after the
> orphaned code, rejects/ignores patches for code that does have
> active maintainers, and looks for people to be maintainers of the
> orphaned code.  
> 
> The key is having enough human to human protocol that there is someone
> besides Linus you can send your code to.  Or at least when there isn't
> people are looking for someone.
> 
> Free Software obtains a lot of it's value by many people scratching an
> itch and fixing a little bug, or adding a little feature, sending the
> code off and then they go off to something else.  We need to have the
> maintainer routing protocol clear enough, and the maintainer coverage
> good enough so we can accumulate most of the bug fixes from the fly by
> night hackers.  
> 
> So does anyone have any good ideas about how to build up routing
> tables?  And almost more importantly how to make certain we have good
> maintainer coverage over the entire kernel?

Yes, we should cc our patches to a patchbot:

  [e-mail] -> goes to linus
  [e-mail] -> goes to marcello
  [e-mail] -> goes to gregkh, regardless of 2.4/2.5
  etc.

The vast sea of eyeballs will do the rest.  A web interface would be a nice 
bonus, but 'patch sent and seen to be sent, to whom, when, what, why' is the 
essential ingredient.

-- 
Daniel