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> It makes sense to be extremely adversarial about accepting code because they're on the hook for maintaining it after that. They have maximum leverage at review time, and 0 leverage after.

I don't follow. The one with zero leverage is the contributor, no? They have to beg and plead with the maintainers to get anything done. Whereas the maintainers can yank code out at any time, at least before when the code makes it into an official stable release. (Which they can control - if they're not sure, they can disable the code to delay the release as long as they want.)




Maintainers can't yank out code if that leads to feature, performance or user space regressions.


Entire filesystems and classes of drivers have been purged from the kernel over time. Removing stuff is not impossible as some here suggest.


Yes, but removing stuff takes a lot of time and effort that most maintainers want to spend doing something more productive or fun.




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