Too many lords, not enough stewards
Too many lords, not enough stewards
Posted Feb 4, 2018 14:20 UTC (Sun) by jani (subscriber, #74547)In reply to: Too many lords, not enough stewards by rodgerd
Parent article: Too many lords, not enough stewards
> 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.
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.
Too many lords, not enough stewards
This is all part of "routing around".