Two important points were brought up with my previous idea. One, communication and direction and so forth. Any patch needing that is branch maintainer territory. The subsystem maintainers are taking care of the small patches so the branch maintainers only need to deal with the bigger patches. Then comes the "but if it's a small patch then it takes no time to commit". This is simply not true -- everything takes some time -- if it takes only one minutes (I doubt they can be done so quick) then thirty of them takes away the time from a bigger one. Edit: We just had a discussion on IRC where went through a bunch of commits checking whether they are on subsystem or branch level and we found that most patches that operate on a subsystem level are really small so it might be that instead we want to name a 'code janitor' or 'yard sweeper' who can save the branch maintainers from "death by ten thousand cuts" and sweep in the minute fixes which drain the branch maintainer's time. This would just add one or at most two people making the communication overhead really small.

Another concern was that what if the subsystem maintainer rewrites a patch in the guise of a review. Well, I have been able to give directions without actually writing the code so I do not fear this either.

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