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Comment by pandapower2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what I thought would happen exactly but when he said he was taking time away I certainly imagined it would be a lot longer than a month.

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To me on the other hand, it was obvious that he would be back as soon as 4.19 was released and the 4.20 merge window opened (the kernel release cycle has two phases, the merge window where new features and the bulk of the changes come in, and a phase where only bug fixes are supposed to come in). He took advantage of the time when the merge window was closed, since it's a less hectic period, and handed over maintenance to someone who already does something similar (Greg KH maintains the "stable" trees, which also accept only bug fixes).

That's impressive foresight.

Why did Linus make such fanfare about his departure if it was always intended to be so short?

Because this was the first time in the history of linux this happened (a non-LTS release that wasn't by Linus himself) and Linus also wanted to take this as an opportunity to apologize for his behavior. Linux is a huge and very important project, so I'm not surprised this deal was a big deal and had a lot of coverage in HN or reddit.

> Why did Linus make such fanfare about his departure

I'm not sure he did. AFAICT he wrote an email on the Linux mailing explaining that he was taking some time off and why. He also did an interview or two, presumably because he was asked.

He probably realised that a portion of the internet would go bananas but that's not entirely his doing.

> That's impressive foresight.

Not really, it was on the announcement email from Linus (https://lwn.net/Articles/764901/):

"To tie this all back to the actual 4.19-rc4 release (no, really, this _is_ related!) I actually think that 4.19 is looking fairly good, things have gotten to the "calm" period of the release cycle, and I've talked to Greg to ask him if he'd mind finishing up 4.19 for me, so that I can take a break, and try to at least fix my own behavior."

If Linus asked Greg to "finish 4.19 for him", it's predictable that he'd be back for 4.20.

Yeah I actually made the same assumption.

But, I suppose for someone who's always quite involved with everything and doesn't take long breaks- one month can seem quite long.

It was a political move from day one. As you might notice Kernel is not the only environment that adds and modifies their CoC currently. There is a group with political goals driving that effort. He wanted to see where the wind is blowing before making a move himself, as well as be flexible enough to also move into the corresponding direction.

That said, I also wonder if he moves too quickly, or if he found an agreement with other FOSS leaders.

Can you identify this "group with political goals driving that effort" or is it speculation bordering on conspiracy theory?

Can you check the other comments in the thread and any other post about CoCs in FOSS communities over the recent 4-16 weeks?

Check out this discussion for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18281676

Also note that my previous comment is at -4 already of the time of this writing, which must be done by someone who doesn't like that opinion. You wouldn't go ask 5-7 of your friends to give downvotes to that comment just because you disagree with it, right?

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