Re: [PATCH 5/5] MAINTAINERS: Add Lukas Wunner as co-maintainer of thunderbolt

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 11:58:26AM +0300, Mika Westerberg wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 12:33:33PM +0300, Mika Westerberg wrote:
> > Hi Lukas,
> > 
> > I'm including Greg here in case I've done something wrong as a maintainer.
> > Since I've only maintained Thunderbolt quite short time, it may be that
> > I've done mistakes but certainly I did not deliberately try to make life of
> > people developing this for older Apple systems harder.
> 
> Greg did not yell at me (yet) so I guess I'm doing OK :)

I have not seen anything to complain about here, so why would I?  :)

> > On Sun, Sep 09, 2018 at 11:42:01PM +0200, Lukas Wunner wrote:
> > > Andreas Noever has let it be known off-list already a while ago that he
> > > currently cannot spare as much time for Thunderbolt development as he'd
> > > like.  As a result the driver's development has become dominated by
> > > Intel.
> > 
> > I was not aware of this. Althought Andreas has not commented much
> > lately, I thought he is still looking after our changes. I hope he still
> > is :)
> > 
> > > I would like to step up as co-maintainer to provide additional checks
> > > and balances and prevent the driver from degenerating into an Intel-only
> > > show.  A number of things really irk me:
> > 
> > I don't have anything against this but at the same time I'm afraid it
> > might lead to a situation where the Thunderbolt driver evolution gets
> > stopped into its tracks because of unnecessary fighting over each patch
> > and change which does not benefit Linux kernel in general.
> 
> I think we have enough maintainers in this subsystem:
> 
>   Andreas - Apple hardware
>   Michael and me - Intel
>   Yehezkel - Microsoft
> 
> But I think we can make you a dedicated reviewer. This should make sure
> you get to review all the patches touching this subsystem.

That would be good.  But always remember, no one, not even a maintainer,
is there as a "gatekeeper".  Everyone can be routed around, or
accidentally forgotten to be cc:ed or patches can come in from other
subsystems as needed.

So adding more reviewers is always great, but it's never a "requirement"
that all people have to review everything before things are merged.

> This is especially important when a random Intel (well, or Apple)
> engineer submits a patch, say fixing a typo in a comment of some data
> structure. There is no point starting to demand that the specific
> register meaning needs to be disclosed. I've said this before but I or
> any other Intel engineer do not have any power over when the spec is
> released or any other related matter (like disclosing registers) and I
> really don't want that every single patch review starts with demanding
> people to disclose something extra. After all they are just trying to
> improve the driver which is good for Linux.

Well said, this is a tough area when dealing with both undocumented
hardware combined with a spec that is not public.  Everyone's trying to
do their best so we should always assume that first.

thanks,

greg k-h