From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp2.linuxfoundation.org (smtp2.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.36]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 10397FF6 for ; Fri, 21 Sep 2018 23:13:52 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtprelay.hostedemail.com (smtprelay0165.hostedemail.com [216.40.44.165]) by smtp2.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 6993A1DAA6 for ; Fri, 21 Sep 2018 23:13:51 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtprelay.hostedemail.com (10.5.19.251.rfc1918.com [10.5.19.251]) by smtpgrave07.hostedemail.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id A422D1802EF38 for ; Fri, 21 Sep 2018 16:05:20 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: From: Joe Perches To: Daniel Vetter , Alexandre Belloni Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2018 09:05:15 -0700 In-Reply-To: References: <8412864.7ztUKcXNNC@avalon> <2019489.6joTqyUi4Z@avalon> <20180911124423.GM2494@piout.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Cc: ksummit Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] community management/subsystem governance List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Tue, 2018-09-11 at 17:02 +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote: > - Talk about the maintainer. If no one wants to help out, but it's a > generally active area, there's a problem. Fairly often it's a human > problem, and the maintainer is blind to their own short-comings. This > is very tricky, and requires enormous amounts of empathy and time, but > can be rectified. Somewhat dubious assertion. Perhaps more often it is a generally active but somewhat isolated subsystem that few take an interest in. > Looking at drivers/rtc over the past 2-3 years it seems like a > decently active subsystem. Probably on the small side of things, but > not catastrophically so. But looking at contributor stats the picture > is totally different: > > 241 Alexandre Belloni > 28 Linus Torvalds > 27 Arnd Bergmann > 25 Javier Martinez Canillas > 20 Uwe Kleine-König > > That kind of skewed contribution statistics is indeed not sustainable, > and indicates some serious problem imo. It's not necessarily serious. A single active maintainer is well capable of maintaining a subsystem as long as it's somewhat contained. It is curious though that one of the nominal maintainers, Alessandro Zummo, has not signed any single commit since 2015 though. > What exactly goes wrong, and > how to best fix it I can't tell without more information though. From > my experience in drm, where we also have some areas with highly skewed > contribution statistics, it could be the maintainer driving people > away, ensuring that there's only one-off contributions. Usually > unkowningly. Possible, but one-off contributions skew noisily today to trivial whitespace and checkpatch/clang warning updates. It generally requires an advanced knowledge of a subsystem to be able to make substantive or even non-trivial changes.