Bcachefs may be headed out of the kernel

I've been following this for a while now.

Kent is in the wrong. Having a lead position in development I would kick Kent of the team.

One thing is to challenge things. What Kent is doing is something completely different. It is obvious he introduced a feature, not only a Bugfix.

If the rules are set in a way that rc1+ gets only Bugfixes, then this is absolutely clear what happens with the feature. Tolerating this once or twice is ok, but Kent is doing this all the time, testing Linus.

Linus is absolutely in the right to kick this out and it's Kent's fault if he does so.

bcachefs is experimental and Kent writes in the LWN comments that nothing would get done if he didn't develop it this way. Filesystems are a massive undertaking and you can have all the rules you want. It doesn't help if nothing gets developed.

It would be interesting how strict the rules are in the Linux kernel for other people. Other projects have nepotistic structures where some developers can do what they want but others cannot.

Anyway, if Linus had developed the kernel with this kind of strictness from the beginning, maybe it wouldn't have taken off. I don't see why experimental features should follow the rules for stable features.

If it's an experimental feature, then why not let changes go into the next version?

That is a valid objection, but I still think that for some huge and difficult features the month long pauses imposed by release cycles are absolutely detrimental.

Ideally they'd be developed outside the kernel until they are perfect, but Kent addresses this in his LWN comment: There is no funding/time to make that ideal scenario possible.

He could release a patch that can be pulled by the people that need it.

If you’re using experimental file systems, I’d expect you to be pretty competent in being able to hold your own in a storage emergency, like compiling a kernel if that’s the way out.

This is a made up emergency, to break the rules.

The inconvenience of this process is also addressed by the dev, as is the different definition of experimental that you're using (though your expectation re kernel doesn't follow even without the mismatch in definitions)