I have occasionally forwarded stuff to Donald. More often, I forward
things to Alan and Davem, simply because they tend to know networking
issues well, and I tend to get more response out of them ;)
And no, I _don't_ feel responsible for specific device drivers, and sure,
I could take the approach that "what do I care if a driver is broken?".
And in fact, without a maintainer, that is what I often end up doing,
although it it turns out to be a problem (it isn't always) I try to prod
people who are silly enough to send me patches to maybe become a
maintainer..
But what would happen if all the drivers were somewhere out in web-land,
and to find the drivers for your random combination of hardware you'd have
to search five different web-sites from five different maintainers? Do you
really think a system can survive that way and find more users? And ever
be tested as a "sum of all parts"? I don't.
So in real life, you need to have a "standard base" that includes all the
stuff most people are reasonably expected to use. It doesn't include some
of the more esoteric stuff (hard realtime, specific drivers for hardware
that exists only in rather special places etc), but it certainly has to
have drivers for things like a random tulip card, would you not say?
And maintaining that "standard base" is what I do. Others do it too,
notably SuSE and Redhat. Much of that "standard base" is based on their
work, in addition to the obvious work by the actual people who create the
actual drivers and new features.
But exactly because Linux is _NOT_ a "one entity does everything"
proposition, it is NOT the case that I go out on the net and find
everything I want to have in the full package. I very much depend on
people like David Miller, Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, and a hundred other
people who not only maintain their own subsystems, but also help me in
maintaining those subsystems as part of the larger whole.
The problem in question is when a maintainer maintains the subsystem, but
does not try to help in maintaining the whole. See? Instant disconnect.
Linus
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