From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
To: Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>
Cc: "ltsi-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org"
<ltsi-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>,
"gregkh@linuxfoundation.org" <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org
Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [Stable kernel] feature backporting collaboration
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2016 18:14:51 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20160922221451.tdh66pm7awzdzzb5@thunk.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20160922162218.GN7994@sirena.org.uk>
On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 05:22:18PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> > That's the strategy we used at Nokia when developing the N900 and N9. It was
> > quite painful though, it was largely believed among the developers that having
> > separate upstream and product teams would have been better.
>
> Yeah, this is partly a preference thing and also a size thing - if the
> organization is too small it's not really sustainable to have dedicated
> team, and if you do split them then there's a big risk that information
> will stop flowing effectively between the two teams which defeats a lot
> of the point.
Having a single team is also helpful if you require that the engineers
who are responsible for forwarding the patch to newer kernels are also
responsible for getting the patches upstream. This way, the pain of
having outstanding technical debt is felt by those who are also
responsible for doing something to reduce the technical debt.
One of the problem for having one-time, special purpose teams for a
product bringup, and then breaking them up right after product lanuch
and reassigning them to another product/team is that there is
absolutely no incentive to pay down technical debt, and all the
incentive in the world to leave a cr*p job for someone else to clean
up, especially if they are given unrealistically tight deadlines.
It's "better" only to have separate product and upstream teams if the
product team are only measured on product launch, and if no one cares
if the upstream team is outnumbered by a factor of three compared to
the product teams throwing cr*p over the wall. So if it's considered
a victory condition for the company to want to pay lip service to
getting things upstream, but doesn't care about whether or not the
"upstreaming" team is getting enough resources to have any chance of
success, sure, it's "better". But to the extent that it can hide
problems, I suspect it can be a recipe towards building up lots of
technical debt and sweeping it under the rug....
- Ted
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2016-09-22 22:14 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 122+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2016-09-01 2:01 Alex Shi
2016-09-02 1:25 ` Levin, Alexander
2016-09-02 2:43 ` Stephen Hemminger
2016-09-02 9:59 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-02 9:54 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-02 10:16 ` [Ksummit-discuss] [LTSI-dev] " Geert Uytterhoeven
2016-09-02 14:42 ` [Ksummit-discuss] " James Bottomley
2016-09-02 14:55 ` Rik van Riel
2016-09-02 15:04 ` James Bottomley
2016-09-02 15:39 ` Rik van Riel
2016-09-02 17:06 ` Bird, Timothy
2016-09-05 1:45 ` NeilBrown
2016-09-05 11:04 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-05 22:44 ` NeilBrown
2016-09-06 0:57 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-06 5:41 ` NeilBrown
2016-09-08 18:33 ` [Ksummit-discuss] [LTSI-dev] " Bird, Timothy
2016-09-08 22:38 ` NeilBrown
2016-09-09 11:01 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-09 22:17 ` NeilBrown
2016-09-12 17:37 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-13 7:46 ` NeilBrown
2016-09-13 17:53 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-02 18:21 ` [Ksummit-discuss] " Olof Johansson
2016-09-02 23:35 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-03 5:29 ` Guenter Roeck
2016-09-03 10:40 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-04 0:10 ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-09-04 8:34 ` gregkh
2016-09-04 22:58 ` Amit Kucheria
2016-09-04 23:51 ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-09-05 12:58 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-05 11:11 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-05 14:03 ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-09-05 14:22 ` Laurent Pinchart
2016-09-06 0:35 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-06 15:30 ` James Bottomley
2016-09-06 19:44 ` gregkh
2016-09-06 22:20 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-06 22:34 ` James Bottomley
2016-09-08 18:55 ` Bird, Timothy
2016-09-08 19:19 ` gregkh
2016-09-09 10:45 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-09 11:03 ` gregkh
2016-09-09 11:48 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-06 23:23 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-06 13:34 ` Catalin Marinas
2016-09-06 16:24 ` Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
2016-09-06 16:25 ` Guenter Roeck
2016-09-06 22:39 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-07 8:33 ` Jan Kara
2016-09-07 8:41 ` Jiri Kosina
2016-09-07 18:44 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-08 17:06 ` Frank Rowand
2016-09-09 10:32 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-09 15:21 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-12 15:34 ` Christoph Hellwig
2016-09-06 16:46 ` Olof Johansson
2016-09-08 8:34 ` Linus Walleij
2016-09-08 8:55 ` Vinod Koul
2016-09-09 14:32 ` Rob Herring
2016-09-09 14:23 ` Rob Herring
[not found] ` <2181684.5VzIQ6DWv4@amdc1976>
2016-09-07 9:32 ` Catalin Marinas
2016-09-07 13:07 ` Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
2016-09-07 18:49 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-09 15:06 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-02 23:29 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-02 19:16 ` Levin, Alexander
2016-09-03 0:05 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-05 9:28 ` Laurent Pinchart
2016-09-21 6:58 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-21 9:23 ` gregkh
2016-09-21 14:52 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-21 15:28 ` gregkh
2016-09-21 18:50 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-22 3:15 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-21 18:22 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-21 18:54 ` Linus Walleij
2016-09-21 19:52 ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-09-22 0:43 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-22 5:20 ` gregkh
2016-09-22 12:56 ` Laurent Pinchart
2016-09-22 16:22 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-22 22:14 ` Theodore Ts'o [this message]
2016-09-23 12:28 ` Laurent Pinchart
2016-09-23 13:27 ` [Ksummit-discuss] [LTSI-dev] " Alex Shi
2016-09-23 13:40 ` Laurent Pinchart
2016-09-23 14:40 ` [Ksummit-discuss] " Mark Brown
2016-09-21 13:56 ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-09-21 15:23 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-21 15:33 ` gregkh
2016-09-21 19:16 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-02 13:47 ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-09-02 19:31 ` Levin, Alexander
2016-09-02 19:42 ` gregkh
2016-09-02 20:06 ` Levin, Alexander
2016-09-03 2:04 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-06 7:20 ` [Ksummit-discuss] [LTSI-dev] " Tsugikazu Shibata
2016-09-10 12:00 ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-09-12 16:27 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-12 17:14 ` Greg KH
2016-09-12 23:45 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-13 3:14 ` Theodore Ts'o
2016-09-13 10:14 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-13 13:19 ` Levin, Alexander
2016-09-13 6:19 ` Greg KH
2016-09-13 10:38 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-13 12:09 ` Greg KH
2016-09-13 12:20 ` Josh Boyer
2016-09-13 13:12 ` Greg KH
2016-09-13 16:23 ` Bird, Timothy
2016-09-13 19:02 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-14 14:47 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-20 5:15 ` Tsugikazu Shibata
2016-09-21 8:46 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-13 12:25 ` Geert Uytterhoeven
2016-09-13 19:21 ` Mark Brown
2016-09-14 1:49 ` Greg KH
2016-09-14 3:00 ` Guenter Roeck
2016-09-12 4:12 ` Alex Shi
2016-09-12 16:09 ` Masami Hiramatsu
2016-09-13 2:39 ` Alex Shi
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