www.kernel.org/hierarchy

[Rick A. Hohensee]

Welcome to www.kernel.org/hierarchy

www.kernel.org/hierarchy/index.html is by Linus. It looks like this...

Send Linux kernel patches to the best fit you can find for what you patch
is about in the web pages starting here...

area                    contact
.......                 ...............         ....................
ext2                    Ted T'so

VFS                     Al the Virile

linux/kernel/           Linus Torvalds
                        Ingo Molnar

not 2.5                 Alan Cox
.                       David Wienhall
.
.
.

        or whatever the map in the mind of the Unit Penguin looks like.
Each area links to another page. Linus sets up the permissions to edit
that page to the people he affiliates with that area. He emails them thier
passwords. All 10-20 of them. This causes them to have analagous authority
over the people and subpages they assign/create. <Submit> buttons are
LAAETTR (left as an excercise...). Down that road lies CVS. The perms
aspect is recursive root on a webserver, also LAAETTR. (that's actually
where a human patch penguin comes in, probably.) Another handy thing would
be for the page to deadman-ping "maintainers" roughly monthly, and trim
the dead ones.

It is also, in contradiction to what the Unit Penguin says, strictly
militaristically hierarchical, as far as perms. It probably won't stay a
true tree, but... But it's just about where to send patches if you're not
a Single-Digit Penguin. The US military is a 5-branch tree. The Romans
used a 10-branch tree. The wonders of the Internet and his manifest genius
seem to enable Torvalds to better the Romans by about 1.5. Caesar gone
hexadecimal. Oh well, politics are unavoidable.

The page itself can be dynamic. It can also become a MAINTAINERS directory
in the sources, at about the same size as MAINTAINERS, with a lynx -dump
or a wget or something in Linus's pack-it-all-up script.

Torvalds talks about his cliq^H^H^H^H main advisors in terms of trust. Who
trusts the trunk of the tree might benefit from better documentation. The
Internet won't eliminate hierarchies. Just documenting them is plenty.

Rick Hohensee