Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] stable kernel process automation and improvement

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

On Tue, 09 Jul 2019 17:44:13 +0200,
Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> 
> On Monday, July 8, 2019 11:31:45 PM CEST Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > On Mon, 8 Jul 2019, Greg KH wrote:
> > 
> > > Well, I think the conversation will go just like it has in the past for
> > > this issue:
> > > 	"We need to have someone track regressions!"
> > > 	"X said they would do it but they need to be paid, any company
> > > 	willing to sponsor this?"
> > > 	{crickets}
> > 
> > SUSE has actually been funding this for quite some time (back when Rafael 
> > was doing it), but it's really tricky.
> > 
> > We of course realize it's very important long-term activity, from which 
> > everybody profits.
> > 
> > At the same time, you need somebody who *really deeply* understands 
> > everything inside and around the kernel development, otherwise you get 
> > more harm and chaos than added value out of the whole excercise.
> > 
> > And if you have such a person (like we had Rafael), it's unlikely that 
> > person would want to do that work forever, and the funding company is also 
> > losing brainpower in other, more development-related areas (like PM in 
> > Rafael's case) at the same time.
> > 
> > So it's not as simple as "hey, you, company making money on linux, go pay 
> > someone to do this".
> > 
> > If I remember correctly (Rafael for sure would remember better), there 
> > were some attempts to have the regression tracking made by someone much 
> > more juniorish, but that person got of course immediately overwhelmed.
> 
> There were such attempts and yes, the people dropped the ball eventually.
> 
> Honestly, I don't agree with the idea that one person can practically track
> regression on the whole kernel basis today, because there is too many potential
> sources of information to follow.  You'd need to track all of the mailing lists used for
> development, bug tracking systems in many places and so on.
> 
> When I was tracking regressions, it was more or less sufficient to follow the LKML,
> and that was hard enough already at that time, but it is not sufficient any more (and
> even the LKML itself has become much more of a fire hose since then).
> 
> The tracking of regressions, to be effective, would need to scale at least in the
> same way as the development process does IMO.

Agreed.  And, I believe the key is to establish the standard way to
report a regression from each subsystem maintainer side.  That is,
instead of a "regression manager" gathering the regression reports
alone by him/herself, we let each maintainer reporting the regression
more easily to a central place.  And there we simply gather and
provide the link to each regression report on a dashboard.

Of course, this would need educations to each maintainer and
developer, but it should be more scalable and sustainable than a
top-down model.


thanks,

Takashi