Greetings, Almost 9 years ago, Jeff Garzik wrote a message on LKML detailing the sad state of wireless LANs in the Linux world. The point of his message was "So... there it is. We suck. There's hope. No Luke Skywalker in sight.": https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/5/671 Shortly thereafter, I became the maintainer for wireless LANs in the Linux kernel: https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/18/377 Since then, we have had a number of wireless summit meetings all around the world. Items were discussed, patches were merged, and friendships were made. Over time, we garnered support from a large range of wireless networking vendors. Eventually even other technologies were sending their patches through my trees, and I was consistently ranked amongst the top 10 "gate keepers" for getting changes into the Linux kernel. In fact, a couple of years ago I even gave a talk on how Linux wireless got better. It has been quite a ride! https://events.linuxfoundation.org/images/stories/pdf/lfcs2012_linville.pdf Nevertheless, I think it is time for some changes. I have been the wireless maintainer for a long time, and I personally would like to develop in a different direction. Plus, I think that Linux will benefit from having some fresh blood involved in more of the maintenance duties. I will be stepping aside to let that happen. The mac80211, bluetooth, and nfc trees have fed through me for some time. I am now asking these trees to send pull request directly to David Miller. Since these trees are managed through git, my hope is that they will not place any significant burden on Dave. As for the wireless driver patches, I have asked Kalle Valo to handle patch review and merge duties for everything under the drivers/net/wireless directory. This will now include not only the ath patches he already manages, but other drivers that don't have trees such as mwifiex, rt2x00, rtlwifi, and others. For consistency, the iwlwifi tree will also be merged through Kalle's new tree. I expect that Kalle will announce any relevant details in a follow-up message. The wireless-testing tree is a resource that some people value. I will continue to provide a wireless-testing tree. Now that tree will feed from the various wireless trees managed by others, probably with some sort of regularly scheduled pulls. Details are still to be determined, but the tree will still exist and will be substantially similar to how it has been so far. I also receive notices of new bug reports for wireless LANs on bugzilla.kernel.org. For now I will continue to triage those reports, so don't ignore me!! :-) Some may ask what I will do now -- I wish I had a specific answer. Immediate plans are to enjoy the coming holidays and my traditional year-end time away from work. After that...well, I'm sure I will find something to do. If you have any suggestions for good uses of my talents, feel free to contact me -- I'm not hard to find! In closing, I hope everyone will support Kalle and the other wireless maintainers at least as much as you have supported me for the past several years. These are good, hard working folks. You are in good hands! Regards, John P.S. Bonus points for anyone that finds a way for me to become a professional retro-computing hobbyist... :-) -- John W. Linville Someday the world will need a hero, and you linville@xxxxxxxxxxxxx might be all we have. Be ready. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-bluetooth" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
