Re: [Ksummit-discuss] "Maintainer summit" invitation discussion

[Nicolas Ferre <nicolas.ferre@atmel.com>]

Le 21/04/2017, 13:03, Alexandre Belloni wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 19/04/2017 at 22:26:34 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 8:59 PM, Linus Torvalds
>> <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>>
>>> What I _would_ like to see is those top maintainers suggest
>>> "submaintainer" names. Particularly Davem, since he doesn't tend to
>>> want to come to the kernel summit, and being at the top of the list
>>> that's a kind of big gaping hole. I guess we haven't had all that many
>>> _problems_ within networking, but if we talk maintainership issues,
>>> it's certainly a bit odd if it's entirely lacking. We have both core
>>> networking and network drivers that both fall under "davem" as far as
>>> my pull statistics go.
>>
>> For ARM, the work also tends to be fairly spread out across many
>> people, with few of us being overly important. [I think that while Olof and
>> I had similar shares of work in pulling in patches, I ended up in one of
>> the top spots because I happened to send more pull requests during
>> the last year, and I also did quite a bit of kernel stuff outside of
>> arch/arm.]
>>
>> So while there is no need for having lots of ARM platform maintainers,
>> I would like to see some of the people that I interact with that also
>> work with a larger number of other maintainers:
>>
>> - One of the device tree maintainers (Rob Herring, Frank Rowand,
>>   Mark Rutland), they inevitably deal with almost all device driver
>>   writers at some point
>>
>> - One of the CLK subsystem maintainers (Michael Turquette,
>>   Stephen Boyd), they also interact with a large number of
>>   subsystem and platform maintainers, and we have had some
>>   disagreements particularly when dealing with three subsystems
>>   (clk, arm-soc and a device driver) in one patch series.
>>
>> - One or two ARM platform maintainers, ideally one that also
>>   maintains another kernel subsystem.
> 
> I would fit that description, although mach-at91 is so small now that we
> have very few issues with arm-soc. However, I have two particular
> points:
>  - what to do which the many coccinelle generated patches that are sent.
> I find that many are not tested, don't really improve readability and
> are sometimes harmful. I used to apply them, I don't anymore because
> they sometimes take too much time to review for absolutely zero benefit.
> The main category is the switch to devm_ functions in old drivers that
> are already handling error case pretty well.
>  - my subsystem (RTC) is pretty dependant on two bus subsystems (I2C and
>    SPI). Sometimes, it would be good to be included in discussions that
> will affect many drivers instead of finding that they have to be patched
> after the fact. I'm mainly thinking about recent work from Javier
> regarding OF matching in i2c. The main drawback of including more people
> is probably the bikeshedding that will ensue but I feel like more
> coordination would have been necessary to make Javier's life a bit
> easier.

Alexandre, correct me if I'm wrong but you could also comment on the
ways to work with several co-maintainers. You have a long experience
with this way of handling an ARM platform (at91, mostly with me ;-)).

Co-maintainship was established 6 years ago in at91 and I think that it
can be good to discuss about the best ways to put in place this model
and the best practice to make it successful. Because we usually hear
about it as the panacea but I do think it also has some severe drawbacks
or limitations.
Don't get me wrong, I do like the work we are doing right now with at91 ;-).

Best regards,
-- 
Nicolas Ferre