Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

[Paul Walmsley <paul@pwsan.com>]

On Wed, 28 May 2014, Rob Herring wrote:

> What really needs to change here as we already essentially have this
> today. Getting more reviewer bandwidth is why we have 5 DT binding
> maintainers.

Yeah, under the change that was proposed earlier, most of those people 
would be "officially designated reviewers" if they're not testing patches 
and sending them upstream.

> DT bindings are a bit unique in that almost everything goes in thru 
> other maintainers trees, so the role is almost entirely reviews. But 
> what's to say a co-maintainers role is not solely reviews. How 
> co-maintainers split up the load is really an internal decision among 
> them.
> 
> Do we really have people we trust to review that we wouldn't trust to
> be a co-maintainer?

Maintainers have different responsibilities than reviewers:

1. Maintainers batch up patches, resolve conflicts with other trees, and 
   send pull requests upstream

2. Leaf maintainers should be testing everything they send upstream, at 
   least in some basic fashion

3. Maintainers are responsible for setting some kind of architectural 
   direction for the parts of the kernel that they maintain


- Paul