Alan Cox - talán az egyik legismertebb 'öreg motoros' a Linux kernel bizniszben - egy kisebb patchet küldött az LKML-re amely több helyen megváltoztatja a Maintainer/Credit listát a Linux kernel forrásában. Alan eltávolította magát a karbantartók közül.Ennek az oka az, hogy Alan kiveszi a tanulmányi szabadságát a Red Hat-nál, és visszatér az egyetemre, hogy tanuljon. Mivel Alan volt a 2.2-es kernel karbantartója is, most két lehetséges verzió van. Vagy végleg befejeződik a 2.2-es kernel karbantartása, vagy új karbantartó után kell nézni.
Feltették neki a kérdést, hogy miért távozik, mire Alan egy magyarázatot postázott:
From: Alan Cox [email blocked]
Subject: Next Month/Changes to where to send stuff
Date: 20 Aug 2003 13:05:10 +0100
At the end of September I'm off back to University on a years sabbatical from Red Hat to study for an MBA. I've made the decision that I'm basically going to vanish for the year so I can concentrate on the course, and on the pet side project of learning Welsh.
I've passed all my userspace projects on to other people already, and I'll be vanishing from kernel space too (except to a few priviledged processes ;)). Lots of people send me stuff as a gateway to getting it into 2.4 and 2.6. Lots of people send me security related stuff.
Can you in future please send stuff to
Security: [email blocked]
2.4: Marcelo/the list/someone he nominates to do that job
2.6: Andrew Morton or for small stuff Rusty Russell's trivial patch manager.
The 2.2 tree needs a new maintainer, someone who can spend their entire life refusing patches, being ignored by the mainstream (because 2.2 is boring) and by vendors (who don't ship 2.2 any more).
I'm not sure what to do about the -ac patch. Most of the remaining stuff is "pending Marcelo" for 2.4 mainstream, but not the O(1) scheduler and some of the odder cool stuff (like the morse bits). As 2.6 becomes relevant 2.4-ac basically becomes a fixed collection of add-ons that aren't mainstream anyway. And of course there are other people keeping patch sets in the same way nowdays.
A few years ago I'd have worried about doing this, the great thing is that with the kernel community we have today I know I'm not a critical cog in the machine. In fact I'm surrounded by people far better than I am and we even have Andrew Morton to keep Linus in check 8)
Dal ati!
Alan
