Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: add Josh Law as reviewer for library code

[Josh Law]

13 Mar 2026 15:48:32 Lorenzo Stoakes (Oracle) <ljs@xxxxxxxxxx>:

> +cc David for mention
>
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 04:33:49PM +0100, Christian Brauner wrote:
>> - first patch Feb 28 under pseudonym "techyguyperplexable", switched to "Josh Law" only when Andrew required a real name
>>   in https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260228114939.de7d44de38d907a9b6632480@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> - 142+ emails in ~2 weeks — 37 patches in a single day (Mar 1)
>> - All trivial/cosmetic — SPDX headers, comment grammar, spacing, const qualifiers. Zero bug fixes, zero new functionality
>> - Carpet-bombed multiple subsystems — lib/, arm64/, staging/, input/, etc.
>> - within 1 week of first-ever patch, submitted MAINTAINERS: add Josh Law as reviewer for library code covering all of lib/ (locking.c, iov_iter.c, rhashtable.c, etc.)
>> - Email identity mismatch — From: hlcj1234567@xxxxxxxxx, Signed-off-by: objecting@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> - Formatting problems — top-posting, line length violations, patches not applying cleanly
>>
>> So I mean, one week to Reviewer. Even if we're being very generous here,
>> we need to do a lot more due diligence going forward. We can't just hand
>> out core components like this and risking our reputation and security
>> posture.
>
> Thanks! Agree absolutely that we need to be careful about this. Jia Tan should
> be instructive.
>
> Josh - there's nothing personal here to be clear, this is a question of
> procedure and caution.
>
> More broadly I think we should avoid assigning new people to catch-all
> categories anyway unless they are well established enough to be involved with
> _everything_ the catch-all covers.
>
> For instance adding people to the mm/* other than perhaps... David ;) would be
> crazy.
>
> Also - Andrew - I think for cases where you are the only maintainer but it
> impacts others, you should seek acks proportional to the scope the MAINTAINERS
> entry spans - in this case that'd be a _lot_ of people - but that only
> underlines that we shouldn't be updating such entries anyway.
>
> In fact - can we just do away with catch-all's and just make sure MAINTAINERS
> entries are established for everything?
>
> I have ground to stand on for this as I personally did it for mm, although we do
> still have a catch-all (not sure if necessary any more?)
>
> In the case of lib/ a quick fix could be to figure out which files are not
> covered by other MAINTAINERS entries and adding them all to what is currently
> the catch-all?
>
> Cheers, Lorenzo

Well, it's already been merged into linux-next, I will keep constantly trying to prove myself as a trusted figure in the community, and I am learning new things every day about the rules, and when you talk about me making "trivial" patches, I also made some medium sized bug fixes, yeah my start was just "janitor" code, but I will try to prove myself,


V/R


Josh Law