... yes, yes, they fucking are. It's the people we meet along (and get along with) not the fucking data. Cherish people who want to work with you, not one mor

... yes, yes, they fucking are. It's the people we meet along (and get along with) not the fucking data. Cherish people who want to work with you, not one more byte saved. Users are responsible for their own backups. If you want to be really responsible educate them. (As you already helped some of them to build their own kernel, you can nudge them to keep proper backups too!) If you have problems with downstream being slow then offer workarounds. How ridiculous is all this, really? Instead of hosting a shell script that sets up a PPA or a cron job with updates or whatever you try to brute force things through Debian and Linus? If users are that important for you give them your phone number or whatever. Seriously. Based on all of what you wrote you need to put effort into having a direct line to your users. (Which is completely fine nowadays. Discord and Twitch/YT office hours and whatnot are all the hype nowadays.) Stop projecting your needs onto other maintainers. > critical system components (the kernel, the filesystem, and others) absolutely need to be able to get bugfixes in a timely manner. That's not optional. that's not how these projects are set up. (and even though your code is upstream to them, your users were (are) downstream to them. they were hosting your project for their users, they can (and did) decide to stop hosting your project.) data integrity and data-loss-prevention are not considered security updates - where we have a culture of out of bad updates. (because the workaround for them is the standing order is to have working backups.)