I appreciate the write-up representing the flow of discussion, not just the outcome, for the insight it carries about how decisions move through the group. It

I appreciate the write-up representing the flow of discussion, not just the outcome, for the insight it carries about how decisions move through the group. It appears Linus has said it is happening, and a bit how it should happen, but has not given strong guidance or even parameters on how long any experiment would last. Instead, he says the maintainers can decide to accept or reject or use Rust however they like. He doesn't even say they should state their policy, so they can let people try and still reject them. Giving maintainers the ultimate discretion I think tracks the incentive system in the kernel: maintainers, who do boatloads of work, get to be deciders. That also gives companies a strong incentive to employ maintainers. On the tools front, Linus expressly said he wants not just an anointed compiler on kernel.org, but compilers from the distributors. He's driving Rust normalization and platform adoption as a condition of use, even though the kernel historically adopts a fairly narrow (if not archaic) set of tools. Somehow this all seems like a bunch of rafts tied together with (platform) boats pushing at the edges -- somewhat tenuous, hard to drive, but vaguely heading in the right direction. As others have mentioned, it's interesting that Linus and many maintainers are getting older, and instead of getting freedom and flexibility in their maturity, they can look forward to more low-level bouts of increasing complexity. When they talk about the integration of Rust, they're clearly anticipating it might not fully happen until after they're gone. That, too, could change the incentives.