[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)
Jason Cooper
jason at lakedaemon.net
Fri Jul 10 13:03:23 UTC 2015
On Thu, Jul 09, 2015 at 11:09:38AM -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 10:18:36PM +0000, Jason Cooper wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 09:29:57PM +0200, Peter Huewe wrote:
>
> > > Not only the bad people drop out, I've seen quite a lot of good devs
> > > vanish for good - and these should be the ones we also should try to
> > > keep - especially since I'm not sure whether we can allow such high
> > > drop out rates over a long time.
> >
> > I'd love to hear some specific examples, links to email threads so we
> > can quantify this. I suspect a lot of it is: "I scratched the itch,
> > and didn't have anything else I wanted to add. Then daily life took me
> > away."
> >
> > Which is the hard part about qualified people. They're busy. :-)
>
> Hopefully I'm not one of the "bad people", and I don't reallly
> consider myself a "drop out".
Absolutely not. It was a sad day when I heard you were stepping down.
fwiw, I reached out to someone who I felt was capable to see
if he could help. Unfortunately, he had some PhD-thesis thingy going
on. :( Back to the 'qualified people are busy' ...
Our greatest mistake is if we don't learn from your experience and make
the system better.
> But, I am someone that recently
> (i.e. since the last KS) extracted himself from a maintainer role.
> It seems like I should have something to add here...
>
> I was the wireless maintainer for roughly seven years. My situation
> may be a bit unique in that I was always more of a "Linux guy" than a
> "wireless guy", and most of the contributors were bigger experts in
> the technology itself than I ever was. That was fine for a while, but
> over time that became less and less comfortable for me. I've never
> really heard anyone else express that sentiment, so this is probably
> not a widespread concern...
I certainly don't have a lot of the hardware people are submitting
patches for, ergo ...
> The bigger concern was that while I was wrangling everyone else's
> wireless patches, I had less and less time to do useful work elsewhere
> in the kernel. I definitely have heard other maintainers express
> similar complaints, so this seems like a relatively common concern.
> It would be good to find and promote maintainer organizations within
> subsystems that are less likely to monopolize the mainainer's
> development time. Previously we have had discussions of how the
> TIP tree is run, but I'm not sure that works well in every case.
> Are there other working models for this?
Olof has already mentioned how arm-soc is handled. As a submitter of
pull requests to them for years, I can vouch that it works quite well.
Additionally, mach-mvebu is co-maintained by myself and three others
(there are multiple SoCs in there, we each have our focus).
Since I started a new job (hence less time for kernel work), we've
rotated out who takes the lead for each cycle. It's a *huge* relief to
know it's not up to me *every* cycle.
Similar experience with Thomas and I on irqchip.
tl;dr: co-maintaining works, works well, and helps avoid burnout. It
also opens the door for part-time involvement.
> I guess I'm suggesting the opposite of a "professional maintainer".
> Some people thrive at being the center of a subsystem, as I did for
> some time with wireless. But burnout is a problem, and I think we
> can limit some of that if somehow we can encourage less expansive
> roles for individual maintainers.
Fully agree.
thx,
Jason.
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