Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Merge tree too flat?

[Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 12:03:45AM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
>On last year's maintainer summit, there was a session where Linus asked
>the participants to bring up topics / questions [1].
>
>I myself was the one raising the concern of the merge tree feeling a
>little bit too flat, and there seemed to be general agreement on that.
>
>Checking the git repository as of now, it seems like we have not changed
>anything in that respect over the past year, and a lot of things are going
>directly to Linus although they could be cascaded a little bit better,
>contributing to better load-balancing on all maintainer levels (including
>the top-level one, of course).

I'm not sure we should be pushing for a more hierarchial tree. Yes, it's
flat, but is it the issue we're trying to address?

With heirarchy, we're asking folks to layer one on top of the other, but
for most subsystems this doesn't work as well (outside, maybe, drivers
that fall under a single subsystem).

I'd argue that what we want is more co-maintainer groups where several
folks share the burden. This, in turn, makes the tree look flat (all of
"x86" is one maintainer group, for example).

I'd also point to the LWN article you've linked: the flat model isn't
called out as an issue either by Linus or by the rest of the group
(which is what I recall from the discussion). Yes, it's flat, but the
solution isn't to make it a pyramid.

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha