The rest of the 6.3 merge window [LWN.net]

The rest of the 6.3 merge window

Posted Mar 6, 2023 22:39 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566)
In reply to: The rest of the 6.3 merge window by Cyberax
Parent article: The rest of the 6.3 merge window

I wonder if the frequent complaints of subsystem maintainers obstructing that upstreaming work was what prompted this.

On a side note, this move is the polar opposite of something Gentoo's quietly been doing the past few months, cracking down on contributors of every tenure and ability solely for not providing a government-verifiable identity. My cynicism says they're doing it to ape current US politics, because the distro has historically courted people like that.

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The rest of the 6.3 merge window

Posted Mar 7, 2023 9:33 UTC (Tue) by sima (subscriber, #160698) [Link]

It's been brewing for a long time because there's been long-established confusion between maintainers that always handled it in the "known identity" sense that Linus explains in the commit message, and some others (I think mostly exceptions as far as I know) who treated it more in the "the name that's on your passport" sense that "real name policy" has become to stand for. At least if you search lore hard enough you find mutterings along these lines a long while back, but it never was very loud.

The rest of the 6.3 merge window

Posted Mar 7, 2023 16:52 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I would guess that the level of review is different. Kernel patches typically flow through a network of maintainers and get at least some attention. With Gentoo most packages have exactly one maintainer who looks at changes.

The rest of the 6.3 merge window

Posted Mar 7, 2023 17:41 UTC (Tue) by lfam (subscriber, #127309) [Link] (1 responses)

> On a side note, this move is the polar opposite of something Gentoo's quietly been doing the past few months, cracking down on contributors of every tenure and ability solely for not providing a government-verifiable identity. My cynicism says they're doing it to ape current US politics, because the distro has historically courted people like that.

Can you link to any context or discussion of this from Gentoo? I'm interested to learn more about it.

The rest of the 6.3 merge window

Posted Mar 20, 2023 23:21 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

https://bugs.gentoo.org/900857 has been in filibuster purgatory until this year, and only because the kernel community's action here has pressured them into doing something. That's very much the tip of the iceberg, parts of the story are in 542498, 606562, 828973 and 895856 (and others, which I've long since lost track of).

Unfortunately nobody's done a cohesive writeup of any of it, and to do so would require deep-diving ~5 years of bugzilla, the -project mailing list (which doesn't seem to be archived anywhere with a usable UI), and… parts of the forums that were deleted outright a few years ago. That's another story entirely, but the short version is that a Large Corporate Sponsor decided it was a bad look for the distro to have no code of conduct or copyright attribution.