On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, S. Baker wrote:
> think there needs to be an easy way to find a person responsible
> for any particular part of the kernel, that one can rely on for
> information about that part.
imho, that is a very bad idea. For very large subsystems like buffer cache
or page cache or VFS or VM or you name it, it is much better to not have a
single authority (except Linus Torvalds of course), because no single
individual are able to form authoritative opinion on topics so
complex. They can form valuable opinions but not 100%
guaranteed-to-be-correct (again, except Linus Torvalds).
Also, you cannot have two most important components of Linux Development
Methodology in your model:
a) creative anarchy (everyone is a maintainer/authority on the piece of
code he wrote or is currently interested in and is free to ignore the rest
of the world and send his patch to Linus or to whomsoever he considers to
be a defacto maintainer (./MAINTAINERS is a good starting place))
b) benevolent dictatorship (only Linus Torvalds is able to make a
decision of what is right and what is wrong and to ignore the rest of the
world)
it is a) and b) working in such symbiotic unity that made Linux kernel
project a success.
> My frustration has come from not having any idea who should be
> looking at the patches I provided. I got a couple of replies,
> but are they authoritative or not?
If you think long and hard enough about your patches there may not even be
a need to review them - you could be an "authority" in itself, as long as
you don't make mistakes. It is because people usually prefer to send
patches after 10 minutes of work where only spending 10 hours would
guarantee 100% quality that the millions of reviewers become an absolute
necessity.
As for your question, it should be obvious from the replies - if they
are "obviously correct" then they are authoritative ;)
> I have spent far more time
> so far trying to get a fix implemented than in finding that fix,
> and it has been an extremely frustrating experience. I don't
> think that it has been one that encourages participation.
No, that can't be true. That is the case with commercial UNIX and not with
Linux. In Linux if a fix exists it gets implemented (by interested parties
which can themselves be end-customers) within hours if not minutes.
Regards,
Tigran
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