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

[Jason Cooper <jason@lakedaemon.net>]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2015 at 11:09:38AM -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> 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".  

Absolutely not.  It was a sad day when I heard you were stepping down.

fwiw, I reached out to someone who I felt was capable to see
if he could help.  Unfortunately, he had some PhD-thesis thingy going
on.  :(  Back to the 'qualified people are busy' ...

Our greatest mistake is if we don't learn from your experience and make
the system better.

> 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...

I certainly don't have a lot of the hardware people are submitting
patches for, ergo ...

> 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?

Olof has already mentioned how arm-soc is handled.  As a submitter of
pull requests to them for years, I can vouch that it works quite well.
Additionally, mach-mvebu is co-maintained by myself and three others
(there are multiple SoCs in there, we each have our focus).

Since I started a new job (hence less time for kernel work), we've
rotated out who takes the lead for each cycle.  It's a *huge* relief to
know it's not up to me *every* cycle.

Similar experience with Thomas and I on irqchip.

tl;dr:  co-maintaining works, works well, and helps avoid burnout.  It
also opens the door for part-time involvement.

> 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.

Fully agree.

thx,

Jason.