Re: AIC7xxx kernel problem with 2.4.2[234] kernels

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Justin T. Gibbs wrote:
> 
> Does the maintainer have the ability to veto changes that harm the
> code they maintain?

Nope. Nobody has that right.

Even _I_ don't veto changes that the right people push (my motto:
"everybody is wrong sometimes: when enough people complain, even I am
wrong"). 

In particular, maintainers of "conceptually higher" generally always have
priority. If Al Viro says a filesystem is doing something wrong from a VFS
standpoint, then that filesystem is broken - regardless of whether the
filesystem maintainer agrees or not. Because the VFS layer requirements 
trump any low-level filesystem issues.

But perhaps more importantly (and it's the reason even _I_ don't have the 
right, regardless of how high up in the maintainership chain I am), nobody 
has veto-power over anything. That's to keep people honest: nobody should 
_ever_ think that they are "in control", and that nobody else can replace 
them. 

In other words: maintainership is not ownership. It's a stewardship.

End result: maintainership is a nasty and mostly unthankful job. It
doesn't really give many privileges, and most of what it does is just have
people complain to you about bugs. The satisfaction is there, of course, 
but 

And finally: maintainership is largely about working with people.  
There's some code in there too, but people tend to be more important.

		Linus