Too many lords, not enough stewards
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 1, 2018 23:53 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)In reply to: Too many lords, not enough stewards by airlied
Parent article: Too many lords, not enough stewards
I cannot speak for Paolo, but it made *me* uneasy because I felt it was painting a distorted picture, which had just enough truth in it the people might believe the whole. I think that would be harmful.
I don't go the LCA to hear how the world is broken. I go to hear what people are doing to fix it - maybe I can join them or learn from them.
This talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3HNeoFuSH0 is only 13 minutes long, and is about working *with* the community, and is certainly worth watching.
> I've been on the receiving end of my fair share of Linus fits,
I learned to laugh at bullies long ago; usually under my breath - I'm not stupid. Laughing at them doesn't change them, but it sure helps me. Pity might be an even healthier response, but it is more challenging.
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Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 2, 2018 0:05 UTC (Fri) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]
I think Daniel might have overpainted the doom and gloom about it all, but maybe the LF can pay for a qualified psychologist booth at the next conference and we can describe our interactions with other community members in private and see what they say.
I know I don't do as much kernel maintainer interaction as I used to because it kinda burned me out each time, Daniel (with my support and shielding from upstream) has pretty much constructed a really good sub community in graphics and he has done more to fix this than giving a talk to explain it's broken. I do wish he'd gone into more detail on the what we can do to fix things, but really there are so many entrenched interests in the wider maintainer community that having anything reduce their standing is hard work, it's like getting politicians to pay themselves less money.
We can't even agree on a way to report bugs in a central manner, never mind what a commit msg should look like. Maybe we need maintainer training sessions.
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 2, 2018 0:35 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
This here. This is the problem. Maintainers are not like politicians.
Politicians have power because the constitution gives it to them.
Maintainers have power only because we, the community, give it to them.
Anyone who wants to can fork the kernel. Linus only has power because people trust him more than they trust anyone else in this very specific role. He doesn't have an army to suppress uprisings, or a state controlled media to convince us that, while all animals are equal, some are more equal than others. All he really has is demonstrated competence and commitment. Same goes for other maintainers.
If you keep telling yourself that the maintainers rule the world and that you have no choice than to bow to their whims or hide under a rock, then it is *you* who are giving them power, and you share some responsibility if they misuse it.
Have you seen the movie "The Help"? "You is strong, you is kind, you is important." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H50llsHm3k) You can use your strength and change the world, or you can just be a victim. Be the change you want to see, then infect others with it.
I'm not at all surprised that Daniel has been doing great things in his sub-community. He did hint at that in the talk. I would have liked to hear more about that.
> how do you avoid bullies when it's your job to deal with them though?
I guess avoidance isn't such a good strategy after all. I'll stick to laughing, and practicing compassion (a better word than 'pity' I think).
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 2, 2018 0:55 UTC (Fri) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]
The method of their use of that power is only formalised through the documentation. At least politicians have some documentation on how they are meant to do things I suppose.
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 3, 2018 22:29 UTC (Sat) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]
Yes, but who in their right mind would want to? The community keeps preaching everyone who cares to listen, and probably many who don't care, about working upstream. Carrying local patches is expensive. I don't think forking the kernel is a viable option to bypass maintainers at any level.
Or I just didn't understand what you mean by forking in this context.
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 4, 2018 5:47 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
Yes it is - long term. Short term it is very cheap.
Apparently working with certain maintainers is also expensive (with others it is a joy).
Depending on your particular needs at a particular time it makes sense to perform a cost/benefit analysis and decide what the best course of action is.
Maybe the best approach is to persist with the maintainer.
Maybe it is to try to route around them.
Maybe it is to fork and maintain a separate tree for a while, and then try to merge again in 6-12 months when circumstances might have changed.
Maybe it is to fork permanently.
Key point is that you have options and you can take control within the parameters of those options. You cannot force other people to change their behaviour, but you can choose how you will behave, and it is valuable to have a clear view of all of the options.
How a person chooses to behave typically speaks more loudly than unsolicited opinions they might choose to present.
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 4, 2018 8:36 UTC (Sun) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
> Yes, but who in their right mind would want to?
Are the people who work at or on Red Hat, SuSE, Google, Amazon, Debian and Oracle? Alan Cox was insane (news to the people who found years of -ac kernels vastly better than Linus kernels)?
The hyper-majority of Linux users are no-where near a mainline kernel, and many developers only touch it to pull patches into their own trees.
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 4, 2018 14:20 UTC (Sun) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]
> Alan Cox was insane (news to the people who found years of -ac kernels vastly better than Linus kernels)?
>
> The hyper-majority of Linux users are no-where near a mainline kernel, and many developers
> only touch it to pull patches into their own trees.
Yet most prefer being as close to upstream as possible, carrying local patches for their chosen stable release, downstream, perhaps to provide "value add" for their customers. Contrast this with, say, hardware vendors or individual developers forking upstream to bypass the maintainer structure, and trying to convince the above mentioned downstreams to carry their out-of-tree patches to deliver to the end users.
I suppose you can argue some level of downstream forking happens all the time, but I just don't see it as a relevant argument in the discussion at hand.
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 4, 2018 21:26 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
It is not unheard of for a hardware vendor to partner with an distro to work on getting hardware support upstream - each side brings different skills for mutual benefit. They work together on a fork when circumstances prevent them from working together upstream.
If an individual developer is having trouble getting a patch upstream, it may make perfect sense to submit a bug report/feature-request to their favourite distro and say "I have a bug, I have a fix, I cannot git it upstream, could you take it directly?". This distro maintainer might do that, or might help get it upstream, or might do both.
This is all part of "routing around".
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 2, 2018 3:00 UTC (Fri) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
Maybe maintainers are doing too much: release management, coding, technical direction, and people leading appear to be what the maintainers would *ideally* do, and in most of the software dev world that's three to four different jobs. On top of that there's always the chance (as Daniel pointed out) of making the front page of The Register if Linus goes on one of performance art excursions to express displeasure with your work.