Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

Since the existing bcachefs driver will not be removed, and the problem is the bcachefs developer not following the rules, I wonder if someone else could take on the role of pulling bcachefs changes into the mainline, while also following the merge window rules.

No, the problem wasn't following the rules.

The patch that kicked off the current conflict was the 'journal_rewind' patch; we recently (6.15) had the worst bug in the entire history upstream - it was taking out entire subvolumes.

The third report got me a metadata dump with everything I needed to debug the issue, thank god, and now we have a great deal of hardening to ensure a bug like this can never happen again. Subsequently, I wrote new repair code, which fully restored the filesystem of the 3rd user hit by the bug (first two had backups).

Linus then flipped out because it was listed as a 'feature' in the pull request; it was only listed that way to make sure that users would know about it if they were affected by the original bug and needed it. Failure to maintain your data is always a bug for a filesystem, and repair code is a bugfix.

In the private maintainer thread, and even in public, things went completely off the rails, with Linus and Ted basically asserting that they knew better than I do which bcachefs patches are regression risks (seriously), and a page and a half rant from Linus on how he doesn't trust my judgement, and a whole lot more.

There have been many repeated arguments like this over bugfixes.

The thing is, since then I started perusing pull requests from other subsystems, and it looks like I've actually been more conservative with what I consider a critical bugfix (and send outside the merge window) than other subsystems. The _only_ thing that's been out of the ordinary with bcachefs has been the volume of bugfixes - but that's exactly what you'd expect to see from a new filesystem that's stabilizing rapidly and closing out user bug reports - high volume of pure bugfixing is exactly what you want to see.

So given that, I don't think having a go-between would solve anything.

It is not good when politics get in the way of good engineering.

Regardless of differing points of view on the situation, I think everyone can agree that bcachefs being actively updated on Linus tree is a good thing, right?

If you were able to work at your own pace, and someone else took the responsibility of pulling your changes at a pace that satisfies Linus, wouldn't that solve the problem of Linux having a good modern/CoW filesystem?