gistfile1.txt

Message-ID: <12dfb0fe-7814-435f-8111-bf0a2009053e@marcan.st>
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2023 15:17:21 +0900
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To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
From: Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st>
Subject: Open invite to chat about kernel maintenance
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Hey Linus,

I wasn't at the Maintainer Summit, but I've seen via LWN that a few
interesting discussions happened about kernel maintenance, Rust,
tooling, etc.

I just wanted to extend an open invitation to talk about any of this
stuff, if you think my input would be valuable.

As you know I maintain a relatively high profile downstream fork (that
we're slowly upstreaming, and keeping synced) that has a decent number
of contributors downstream from me, as well as being arguably the
largest Rust for Linux real-world user. I've butted heads with a lot of
the current process, Rust issues, etc. as well as talked to a lot of
downstream folks (quite a few of whom are unwilling to directly upstream
stuff for various reasons) and seen how things played off in different
cases. I'm also interested in pushing forward kernel tooling, in terms
of the contribution process, CI, code formatting, etc. (I'm building an
Asahi kernel/Mesa CI farm over the next few months). And these days I'm
also a Fedora packager and have seen the distro side of things.

Happy to chat over email, voice/video call, etc. Whatever works, if
you're interested.

- Hector

The maintainer summit is invite-only with only up to 30 participants. So you couldn't just have gone there.

The proper way would have been to submit a topic in response to the Call for Topics message on the ksummit mailing list. Directly e-mailing Linus isn't the correct process because he doesn't decide on the invitees or the topics alone.

This was not a suggestion for a topic for the Maintainer Summit, nor was I implying that I could just attend. It was a response and offer to collaborate based on topics which were discussed there and reported on LWN.

I think Maintainer Summit would have been an appropriate venue to raise your concerns. I'd also assume that Linus would be more comfortable having this discussion in a community setting, rather than in private without involvement of other stakeholders or maintainers.

Perhaps, and then he could have expressed so in a reply, and that would have been perfectly fine. It was an offer to collaborate, not a demand. I wasn't even "raising concerns" (you might be interpreting the email from the point of view of recent events, which is not the correct context). I just offered to open a conversation.

But given how much Linux stuff goes on in private email threads and not any kind of community setting, I have my doubts about the weight of that argument.