Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 20 Oct 1999 16:23:47 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: PATCH 2.3.23 pre 2 compile fixes |
| |
On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Martin Dalecki wrote: > > Whey the hell do you feel responsible yorself? Let it in > and forward everything to Donald. (procmail could even do it...) > That's what maintainers are for.
I have occasionally forwarded stuff to Donald. More often, I forward things to Alan and Davem, simply because they tend to know networking issues well, and I tend to get more response out of them ;)
And no, I _don't_ feel responsible for specific device drivers, and sure, I could take the approach that "what do I care if a driver is broken?". And in fact, without a maintainer, that is what I often end up doing, although it it turns out to be a problem (it isn't always) I try to prod people who are silly enough to send me patches to maybe become a maintainer..
But what would happen if all the drivers were somewhere out in web-land, and to find the drivers for your random combination of hardware you'd have to search five different web-sites from five different maintainers? Do you really think a system can survive that way and find more users? And ever be tested as a "sum of all parts"? I don't.
So in real life, you need to have a "standard base" that includes all the stuff most people are reasonably expected to use. It doesn't include some of the more esoteric stuff (hard realtime, specific drivers for hardware that exists only in rather special places etc), but it certainly has to have drivers for things like a random tulip card, would you not say?
And maintaining that "standard base" is what I do. Others do it too, notably SuSE and Redhat. Much of that "standard base" is based on their work, in addition to the obvious work by the actual people who create the actual drivers and new features.
But exactly because Linux is _NOT_ a "one entity does everything" proposition, it is NOT the case that I go out on the net and find everything I want to have in the full package. I very much depend on people like David Miller, Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, and a hundred other people who not only maintain their own subsystems, but also help me in maintaining those subsystems as part of the larger whole.
The problem in question is when a maintainer maintains the subsystem, but does not try to help in maintaining the whole. See? Instant disconnect.
Linus
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |