Following Hektor Martin's announcement of stepping down as maintainer and ceasing participation in the review of patches, Karol Herbst, who has been accompanying the Nouveau driver and the MMIO tracing mechanism (MMIOTRACE) working at Red Hat, also made a similar announcement. After his departure, two maintainer roles will remain in the kernel to support the Nouveau driver, who, according to Karol, are doing an excellent job.
The reason for his departure is cited as the lack of an inclusive atmosphere among kernel developers. Karol is convinced that in the open-source community, work should be conducted with respect, on equal terms, and without power plays. According to Karol, the last straw was a message from Theodore Ts'o, in which he compared maintainers to a 'thin blue line' (which is associated with law enforcement and symbolizes the boundary between order and anarchy), striving to ensure that the code accepted into the kernel is maintainable and of high quality.
In Karol's opinion, someone who speaks such words cannot hold the position of a maintainer, no matter how important they are to the project, and they should be excluded before they realize what these words mean to many marginalized people and the horrors they evoke in their minds. Karol is leaving because he cannot remain in a community that tolerates such language.
Theodore Ts'o made the comparison to the thin blue line during discussions on the resistance of older developers to advancing Rust into the kernel. He wrote that the power of maintainers is limited, and they cannot influence the continuation of development for changes already accepted since they have no authority to order people to work on refinements and improvements to the testing infrastructure. The only quality assurance tool is the maintainers' ability to prevent the inclusion of raw and questionable changes into the kernel. Once the code is accepted, maintainers lose leverage over developers and become personally responsible for that code.
When accepting a significant change, maintainers must ensure that the change is fully functional and that its developers can support the code after it is accepted into the core and will not leave it unattended. Theodor cites examples of teams that are only interested in promoting their creation, who disappear as soon as the code is accepted and do not reappear, leaving maintainers to deal with all the shortcomings.
Some are accused of double standards because some developers' code is accepted almost immediately, while others' code takes a long time to process. In this matter, established trust and a well-deserved reputation are crucial. If a developer has already demonstrated their ability to be accountable for the submitted changes, agreements are reached quickly. For newcomers, the acceptance of changes can take longer, as the maintainer must understand whether the participant can be accountable for their code. Therefore, participants, especially those trying to promote radical changes, need to spend a lot of time becoming part of the community. For example, it took 10 years to integrate changes for building the kernel with the Clang compiler.
Source: opennet.ru
