Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

["John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com>]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 10:18:36PM +0000, Jason Cooper wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 09:29:57PM +0200, Peter Huewe wrote:

> > Not only the bad people drop out, I've seen quite a lot of good devs
> > vanish for good - and these should be the ones we also should try to
> > keep - especially since I'm not sure whether we can allow such high
> > drop out rates over a long time.
> 
> I'd love to hear some specific examples, links to email threads so we
> can quantify this.  I suspect a lot of it is: "I scratched the itch,
> and didn't have anything else I wanted to add. Then daily life took me
> away."
> 
> Which is the hard part about qualified people.  They're busy. :-)

Hopefully I'm not one of the "bad people", and I don't reallly
consider myself a "drop out".  But, I am someone that recently
(i.e. since the last KS) extracted himself from a maintainer role.
It seems like I should have something to add here...

I was the wireless maintainer for roughly seven years.  My situation
may be a bit unique in that I was always more of a "Linux guy" than a
"wireless guy", and most of the contributors were bigger experts in
the technology itself than I ever was.  That was fine for a while, but
over time that became less and less comfortable for me.  I've never
really heard anyone else express that sentiment, so this is probably
not a widespread concern...

The bigger concern was that while I was wrangling everyone else's
wireless patches, I had less and less time to do useful work elsewhere
in the kernel.  I definitely have heard other maintainers express
similar complaints, so this seems like a relatively common concern.
It would be good to find and promote maintainer organizations within
subsystems that are less likely to monopolize the mainainer's
development time.  Previously we have had discussions of how the
TIP tree is run, but I'm not sure that works well in every case.
Are there other working models for this?

I guess I'm suggesting the opposite of a "professional maintainer".
Some people thrive at being the center of a subsystem, as I did for
some time with wireless.  But burnout is a problem, and I think we
can limit some of that if somehow we can encourage less expansive
roles for individual maintainers.

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville@tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.