Re: Policy regarding linux-next only changes

[Theodore Tso]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2026 at 06:49:44PM -0500, Mark Brown wrote:
> The other side of this is that the reason people are noticing that you
> have added these patches is that you are causing breakage and disruption
> for them that catches them by surprise, a lot of what's coming through
> here is that you need to work actively with other people.

I will note that the last person who attempted to push changes to
other subsystems via their own tree was Kent Overstreet.  That was
considered **extremely** anti-social, and after people complained
Linus agreed to reject any pull request that had changes outside of
bcachefs.

This is slightly different, in that it is pushing broken patches into
linux-next, instead of Linus's tree, but I think there is a similar
precedent.  If someone is doing something abusive, it doesn't matter
whether it's because they think they are doing something where the
means justify the ends (whether it's "I fix syzbot bugs" or "I make a
file system which doesn't eat your data").  If you do things in an
antisocial way, Maintainers are *not* obligated to work with you, and
while you can appeal to Linus, you might not like the resolution....

      	      	     	       	   	 - Ted