Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Time to call it quits for the maintainer summit?

On Fri, 2026-08-07 at 10:27 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Aug 2026 at 16:50, Steven Rostedt <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > 
> > I guess it really comes down to what Linus wants. He's been saying
> > he would love to get rid of Kernel/Maintainers Summit for years.
> 
> So as you say, I don't love it. The original kernel summits way back
> when was great and I enjoyed it a lot - but that was a *long* time
> ago and the scopes were smaller and I think the problems were smaller
> too.
> 
> We had technical issues that were universally interesting.
> 
> Then the developer community grew and it became less universal with
> the technical discussions often really just being cliques where some
> developers were interested in particular issues and others that
> "checked out" of that part entirely.
> 
> The maintainer summit was an attempt at keeping it focused on pure
> maintainership questions, and keeping technical discussions that
> don't cross maintainership borders in email or targeted
> miniconferences and the like.
> 
> And it *works* in that sense, and I think it has been useful, but I
> have to admit to still feeling like it's not wonderful.
> 
> For example, I keep generating the partial list of people that I
> think should be part of it, and honestly, for the last few years it
> has been a very similar list every time.

So this sounds like part of the problem: if you always generate the
same list of people you're going to get the same ideas coming around. 
If you want different ideas and perspectives you need diversity of
views in some form ... I get you said "partial" but if the rest of that
partial is pretty much the same too, then there's a definitely sameness
problem with the selection process.

> Which is fine and a measure of reality: it's not like the main
> maintainers have changed very much - but it still makes me just think
> it's also just a bit staid.
> 
> To explain that last point: back in the olden days, when we lived in
> caves and communicated by grunts and gestures, and I still lived in
> Helsinki and knew basically _none_ of the developers personally, I
> felt that the Linux community was in fact a bit more "open" to people
> because we didn't have this whole tightly knit community of old-
> timers that the BSD's had, or the physical closeness that some other
> projects had with all the developers actually meeting in person.
> 
> And I thought that was a good thing. No "in-group" behavior.
> 
> The maintainer summit being a pretty constant "in-group" is
> fundamental, but it still feels a bit sad and wrong to me.

Effectively you've made it a Leadership Team (LT) meeting and actually
the conclave.rst thing pretty much embeds that because it seems to be
founded on the idea that the maintainer summit represents the
leadership.

Just going on the Plumbers experience, I do think the problem sounds
like it has shrunk too far (you do need a certain number in a room just
to get discussion going properly).  You don't need to expand it up to
the 100 or so people it was, but it really sounds like you do need a
little expansion.

In industry generally, there's often a concept of XLT (expanded
leadership team), which means you invite some of your skip levels and
general contrarians and other individual contributors in to shake up
the perspective a little.  So perhaps expanding from ~34 to ~54 and
allocating 20 places for less well known maintainers and possibly even
new people.  This could be as simple as giving instructions to the
other bit of the selection to look for people who would express
differing viewpoints and generate useful debate.

Incidentally, if you wanted to raffle off the expanded places in some
sort of buy a lottery ticket or buy a sponsorship scheme, we might be
able to make that work as a funding model.

Regards,

James