Too many lords, not enough stewards

I'm the maintainer of a newish small part of the kernel. I send my
pull requests directly to Linus. I work hard to make sure the small
pull requests I send each merge window will merge with no problems.
So far I've never gotten more than one or two emails from Linus, they've
all been very pleasant. The particular one I remember best was when we
were still trying to go upstream, it had a smiley face in it where Linus
told me he be happy to accept us upstream as soon as Al Viro approved <g>.

Then I started getting emails from Al Viro with the most awesome
descriptions (which occasionally contained well chosen bad words,
or comparisons to things that probably aren't physically possible)
of the parts of our project that would have to be fixed
before we could be accepted. We worked hard on those parts, and as
time progressed, Al went way overboard helping me on weekends with
the parts he could see I was having a hard time with.

When I go to the LF meetings that the other maintainers go to, I'm
amazed at the depth of knowledge that many of them have. I'm old, I'll
never progress to that level, but there's a young guy on our team
that probably will. I doubt he's an anomaly, and when the time comes
there will be people ready to take over for the current set of
"irreplaceable" maintainers.

I get a handful of patches from other developers each development
cycle. Sometimes because they were reading our code and see a way
to make it better, sometimes because their fuzzers saw something
that was a problem. I'm thankful for all these patches and can't
imagine being abusive to their senders.

I guess that's my long-winded way of saying that I don't perceive
the current model as being broken.

-Mike "nothing's perfect"