reflum,

On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 14:52 +0000, Steven Whitehouse wrote:

On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 13:52 +0000, mike.gair@tatasteel.com wrote:

quoted

In theory i'd be interested in maintaining it,
but i'm not sure what amount of work is involved,
have no experience of kernel, or where to start.

Any ideas?

So the issue is basically that due to there being nobody currently
maintaining the DECnet stack, it puts a burden on the core network
maintainers when they make cross-protocol changes, as they have to
figure out what impact the changes are likely to have on the DECnet
stack. So its an extra barrier to making cross-protocol code changes.

If there was an active maintainer who could be a source of knowledge
(and the odd patch to help out making those changes) then this issue
would largely go away.

*nods*

The most important duty of the maintainer is just to watch whats going
on in the core networking development and to contribute the DECnet part
of that. So it would be most likely be more a reviewing of patches and
providing advice role, than one of writing patches (though it could be
that too) and ensuring that the code continues to function correctly by
testing it from time to time.

The ideal maintainer would have an in-depth knowledge of the core Linux
networking stack (socket layer, dst and neigh code), the DECnet specs
and have a good knowledge of C. 

I guess I would fit mostly but I have no idea of the kernel internal
stuff. Also I'm a bit short on time.

Bearing in mind the low patch volume (almost zero, except for core
stuff), it would probably be one of the subsystems with the least amount
of work to do in maintaining it. So in some ways, a good intro for a new
maintainer.

Jup. This is very true. I hope we will find a new maintainer because of
exactly this point. Maybe somebody like Mike Gair.

I do try and keep an eye on what get submitted to the DECnet code and
I'll continue to do that while it is still in the kernel. However, it is
now quite a long time since I last did any substantial work in the
networking area and things have moved on a fair bit in the mean time. I
don't have a lot of time to review DECnet patches these days and no way
to actually test any contributions against a real DECnet implementation.

I'm glad you are still interested. I'm always happy when I see mails
from you at the DECnet for Linux list.

So I'll provide what help I can to anybody who wants to take the role
on, within those limitations. I'm also happy to answer questions about
why things were done in a particular way, for example.

It is good to know that people are still using the Linux DECnet code
too. It has lived far beyond the time when I'd envisioned it still being
useful :-)

There are still some people interested in it. Btw. on Debian popcon
counts 5356 users.

-- 
Philipp.
 (Rah of PH2)