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.
The rules were clear about the right time to merge things so they get in the next version, and if you don't, they will have to get in the version after that. I don't know the specific time since I'm not a kernel developer, but there was one.
Linus is trying to run the release cycle on a strict schedule, like a train station. You are trying to delay the train so that you can load more luggage on, instead of just waiting for the next train. You are not doing this once or twice in an emergency, but you are trying to delay every single train. Every single train, *you* have some "emergency" which requires the train to wait just for you. And the station master has gotten fed up and kicked you out of the station.
How can it be an emergency if it happens every single time? You need to plan better, so you will be ready before the train arrives. No, the train won't wait for you just because you forgot your hairbrush, and it won't even wait for you to go home and turn your oven off, even though that's really important. You have to get on the next train instead, but you don't understand that other people have their own schedules instead of running according to yours.
If it happened once, okay - shit happens. But it happens every time. Why is that? They aren't mad at you because of this specific feature. They are mad at you because it happens every time. It seems like bcachefs is not stable. Perhaps it really was an emergency just the one time you're talking about, but that means it either was an emergency all the other times and your filesystem is too broken to be in the kernel, or it wasn't an emergency all the other times and you chose to become the boy who cried wolf. In either case Linus's reaction is valid.
It is a not a bugfix, and you know it :(
If you are not acting on bad faith, I suggest you read Wittgensen
He has made a lot of work around the idea of language, which basically boil down to the fact that words have no intrinsic meaning : the meaning of a word is the meaning that a given population gives to that word
So in your case, you may be right about the meaning of the word "bugfix" in some population, but you must translate and use the meaning of that word in the "kernel" population
The dictionary is a lie .. :)