It has been said that an important part of a maintainer's role is to
say "no". Just how this "no" is said can define the style and
effectiveness of a maintainer. Linus Torvalds recently displayed just
how effective his style can be when saying "no" to a pair of fairly
innocuous patches
to add a new ioctl() command for block devices — patches in
their fifth revision that had already received "Reviewed-by" tags from
Christoph Hellwig.
Subscribers can click below to see Neil Brown's look at how this all played out.