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This makes me wonder if there are any projects that succeeded in letting contributors just choose not to work with certain other contributors. Big companies make this work just fine, sometimes there are personality conflicts and we resolve them by moving people around to work on other parts of the same product.
I knew one high level IC who got along with his manager so terribly that he ended up reporting to an entirely different manager than everyone else on his team.
Not everyone needs to be a reviewer for every pull request, or to participate in every group chat.
Most projects don't really have enough people for complex structures. I keep pointing to MinecraftForge, and while the commit log is even less good of a record than normal because some parts were ported from other version control, it gives a good idea of how much Zif's Law applies even for these structures. To the extent they end up with multiple maintainers at all, it's much more often to solve the 'hit by a truck' problem than any serious planning.
There's been a few efforts to come up with more robust structures, but I'm skeptical that they're trying to solve the right problem, nevermind actually having a solution. Given that the FOSS ones I can name are QuiltMC and Rust, this is... not the most encouraging endorsement (and Quilt specifically had a big snafu over their original keyholder).
Linus Torvald has lieutenants, and in practice who you draw matters a lot, but in theory and at the edge case he's got veto power over everything and anything that catches his attention. Python has a five-person lead council since van Rossum retired in 2018, but the only way to cycle the leadership is to wait. Occasionally you'll see corp-adjacent groups try to have reviewers selected from other parts of the same project or even from a set who just do reviews, but then the people reviewing the PRs aren't really tied to the code it's changing.
The bigger problem's that the overwhelming majority of FOSS contributors don't stay in any place for that long, especially when it's not their own project, and those that do tend to be a little obsessed.
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