Stepping down as maintainer

Hi everyone,

I'm stepping down from all my maintainer roles. My first commit feed9bab7b14 ("spi: omap2_mcspi PIO RX fix") to the kernel was back in 2008 for v2.6.24 so I have been here for a long time. Thank you everyone who I have worked with, there are too many to list here.

Jeff continues to maintain ath10k, ath11k and ath12k drivers so they are unaffected. But for the wireless driver maintainer (drivers/net/wireless/) there is no replacement at the moment. If anyone is interested, please do let Johannes and me know.

Kalle

Well, my friend, I suppose the time has come for you to move on to something else? I truly hope that something exciting and rewarding awaits you!

You have done a great job in this maintainer role, and I am very certain that you will be missed. Few people realize how thankless such a role can be, but I do. I hope you will now have some some time to enjoy your sauna as you consider what comes next for you.

Thanks for the job you have done.

Terveisin!

John

John W. Linville	Someday the world will need a hero, and you
[email protected]		might be all we have.  Be ready.

I didn´t know John was still on the list! Hi John! I have enjoyed your return to retro-computing elsewhere.

I too, thank you for your service in this role, and hope you find something rewarding to do.

Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Hi Kalle,

I think we met only once in Seville in ... 2016..

I also would like to take a few moments to thank you for the work you've done for us all. Just like for many areas in life, we take things for granted and only when there is a change we sometimes become more attentive to what people have done for so many years without being recognized enough.

Good luck and I hope you'll enjoy the ride of your next adventure!

John, I think the last mail I got from you was when you stepped down... I assume that the equipment that was considered then state of the art is now under heavy development as part of your vintage hobby? ;)

Thank you for all the hard work over the years, Kalle!

You will certainly be missed

Hi Kalle, all,

First and foremost, let me add my thanks to the list here. We've worked together for many years on wireless now and I appreciate that greatly, personally and also in the role you've played in shaping wireless, be it through the reviews directly, or the more indirect things like sharing the tree maintenance etc. Thank you!

This is also an opportunity to thank Qualcomm for sponsoring your work here. Certainly I'd expect they also got a lot of value out of it, but we the community definitely got a lot, so thank you Qualcomm!

I'll be honest and say that I did delay my reply to see if anyone would speak up, but in the short term I really didn't expect anyone to step up. We're pretty niche in wireless, after all :)

There's obviously reluctance of netdev picking up any wireless related activity, and that would anyway be impractical if cfg80211 and/or mac80211 were to remain separate. There's also a clear separation of the lists, and given the volumes involved I think that's likely better for everyone.

In the short term at least, I therefore expect that I will (need to) be the custodian of the wireless trees. And I say "custodian" rather than "maintainer" quite intentionally, because I cannot really take on the role as you've filled it in the past. Shoes a few sizes too big, I guess.

So as the wireless community, I think we will need to come to terms with the fact that our workflow and processes will change now, and we'll invariably have to take on some new work. In some ways, netdev has already undergone such a transformation in the past, with
* maintenance shared across more people (to some extent),
* a lot more emphasis on reviewers _other_ than the maintainers, and
* automation to take care of rote things.

I'm not sure we will be able to find (trusted) people willing to share the maintenance with in the short term, but the other two things seem entirely manageable in the short term. I'm already checking if I can get (interim) automation set up in the short term, with a more permanent setup, independent of myself or hopefully any company, to come later.

As for reviews, I suppose that'll be a new thing in the wireless world where pretty much everyone (with few exceptions) works in their driver niche. I would think that was also the case for Ethernet in the past though, where now we see "cross-vendor" Reviewed-by tags on many patches, even ones specific to other drivers. This is where we should get to, to distribute reviews across more people. For those of you who may not have seen, Jakub also publishes statistics about that, e.g.
https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/[email protected]/

Hopefully then over time we'll see where things fall, and find one or multiple people to share the tree maintenance with again. Bus factor and all that.

However, that's only *my* vision for how we continue to maintain the wireless tree going from here. I'm open to other suggestions (though pre-emptively reject the suggestion that "every driver has their own maintainer and that's good enough...")

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks again Kalle! :-)

johannes

PS: I'll update patchwork auto-delegation accordingly soon, just have to remember when I have enough time to click all the slow buttons there