Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

[Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>]

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On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:26:29PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:

> > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little
> > bit.
> > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you
> > will review and also merge their stuff in return.
> > Sometimes this works.
> > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full
> > time on similar things, yay! So much support.
> > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well.
> > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to
> > review and you feel like begging.
> > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed.

> I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's
> certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking
> contributors to review patches that are directly related to their
> business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company
> to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their
> patches. The contributor helped with reviewing third-party contributions
> to the driver they're actively working on. When I asked for help
> reviewing an entirely separate driver that their employer had no
> business interest in, however, I faced the "we're busy and don't have
> time" argument.

> Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to
> expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources,
> to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in
> their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest.

That issue with people having the background knowledge needed to
adequately review things they don't have specific experience with can be
a problem here.  It's not typically *harmful* other than issues with
people doing disproportionately pedantic reviews (which can be a
problem) but you do still need to keep an eye on things it can feel a
bit make work so there's a balance with making it an explicit
requirement.

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