From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.35]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id A6D0EA04 for ; Thu, 9 Jul 2015 18:37:49 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-oi0-f49.google.com (mail-oi0-f49.google.com [209.85.218.49]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id DC90BA8 for ; Thu, 9 Jul 2015 18:37:48 +0000 (UTC) Received: by oibp128 with SMTP id p128so34343875oib.3 for ; Thu, 09 Jul 2015 11:37:48 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20150709150938.GF4265@tuxdriver.com> References: <201507080121.41463.PeterHuewe@gmx.de> <20150708140727.GH23515@io.lakedaemon.net> <20150708221836.GN23515@io.lakedaemon.net> <20150709150938.GF4265@tuxdriver.com> Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2015 20:37:48 +0200 Message-ID: From: Olof Johansson To: "John W. Linville" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Cc: Jason Cooper , "ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org" Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists) List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 5:09 PM, John W. Linville wrote: > 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? arm-soc is ran a bit like TIP, but not identically. It's usually Arnd and I who handle most of it, with Kevin Kilman stepping in in particular when Arnd goes on paternity leave. On a whole, I can say that Arnd seems to have time left to deal with other parts of the kernel and posting patches, since he spends most or all of his work on upstream stuff while it's mostly a side activity for me. One thing that we're doing that's quite helpful is that we hand off and mostly time-slice our maintainership, which means you get to be off from it for a while every now and then. That's different from TIP where they instead tend to have areas of the kernel that each co-maintainer focuses on. The last couple of months I've been overly busy with work and life and I've stepped away shortly, which our model makes fairly easy to do. I'm re-engaging now though, since Arnd is out on paternity leave again so me and Kevin are looking after things through the fall. We also don't engage all that much with developers directly -- mostly new lead developers/maintainers on new platforms and people upstreaming new SoC families. Most of the day to day work is delegated to per-vendor maintainers below us and we work with them on the back end and merge their branches. I think we've talked about how we handle our work in the past, but I'd be happy to elaborate more (here over email or elsewhere) if anyone wants to learn more about what we've found to work pretty well for us. -Olof