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

On Mon, 10 Aug 2026 at 04:41, Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 07, 2026 at 10:27:27AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > The maintainer summit being a pretty constant "in-group" is
> > fundamental, but it still feels a bit sad and wrong to me.
>
> It feels less like a naturally emerging in-group and more like a clique,
> and I've heard the same view expressed to me by a good few other
> maintainers.

Not to be pedantic, but these are the same thing. How can you make any
reasonsable interpretation of clique vs emerging in-group in a group
of 30-100 people.

I'm one of those who attended every maintainer summit since inception,
including the one at 2am my time during COVID. I'm quite vocal in the
room on behalf of my subsystem and myself, but at no point have I ever
felt part of a clique or in-group at all.

I think people really have a misconception about what goes on at the
maintainer summit, the best explanation I've been given was that it is
Linus's staff meeting. The people that Linus works with closest, get
invited to talk to Linus and help him figure out where the overall
ship is going and where things are going wrong.

There is usually 0 useful technical content, and we've certainly never
taken a vote on anything. Like I get some parts of mm might feel
controversial and you want to think that talking in that group might
be useful, but it's not.

I generally go on behalf of drm, because I'm the person who interacts
with Linus the most, and I'm weary of wasting anyone else times on
going because they feel there is some brilliant clique or in-group
they are not part of.

> For instance, I made a submission last year (I was nagged to by somebody :)
> but I had no expectation of being invited as I did not (nor do not)
> consider myself anywhere near elite or established enough to fulfil the
> criteria above.

Your language choice already makes it feel like you see it as some
elite or special group. It's a bunch of technical project managers
talking about the processes of producing the kernel. If a talk about
the technical content of the kernel sneaks in it's very rare and also
usually not of interest to half the room.

> I mean I don't know, maybe it's necessary to run it as a tight ship of
> trusted people, but I think we should at least be more clear about that.
>
> However I wonder whether we should look at an alternative approach like
> those with M: entries in MAINTAINERS voting on topics, or something
> similar.

Voting on what though, I'm already over the number of times
maintainers with small potato problems think that the lives of
maintainers with big potato problems would be much simpler if they
just adopted their niche one-person mutt based review process.

Dave.