Comment by rlpb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rlpb | Hacker News Reader

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Canonical volunteered to maintain LTS kernels within the community, but upstream refuses to accept Canonical's contributions - ironically because apparently they "don't work within the community". Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/608917/

Canonical maintained them anyway, though, just not officially. Sources: https://lwn.net/Articles/618862/ https://lwn.net/Articles/667925/ https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/12/15/538. I don't see more recent announcements; I don't know if they stopped because of continuous rejection of their community contributions from upstream, or if they are continuing anyway and I'm not aware.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical. I'm not authorised to speak for Canonical, expressed opinions here are my own. [Edit: I should add that I don't work on the kernel so I feel like I'm as much an outside observer as you probably are]. But I'm not sure I'm even expressing an opinion here - just citing some relevant, publicly verifiable facts.

There's a difference between a company volunteering money/employees and a company taking over maintenance of the branch itself.

If Canonical was not willing to do the former, it implies the kernel developers were correct.

It switched to your opinion when you said ironically and didn’t list the real reason the upstream patches were rejected.

I'm just going by the article I cited. I don't know any more than the reason given there. And come on: how is refusing contributions when the cited reason is not contributing not ironic?

Minor thing, if you look at the citation it says that they don't want to hand over official control of official branches to Canonical because they don't trust them to engage with the community, with those citations OP must have meant "accept contributions" as "accept canonical being in control of older official kernel branches to decide what patches are accept (even though no one else will)" rather than they are not accepting patches from canonical.

Given Canonical's outright user-hostile decisions in recent past I don't blame kernel devs for not trusting them at all.

Such as? And they still accept redhat contributions so your point is moot anyways.

Snap

The LXD - Incus saga with the linuxcontainers community is a very good indicator of how Canonical would behave in a similar situation.

What sort of user hostile actions would one take on a 5 year old kernel version?

canonical ceased to be relevant with the usability disaster that was the hype-driven unity desktop.

I don't see how the UX of Unity applies to kernel maintenance?

Ubuntu is still pretty widely used for a Linux distro?

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