[Ksummit-discuss] "Maintainer summit" invitation discussion
James Bottomley
James.Bottomley at HansenPartnership.com
Thu Apr 20 13:25:32 UTC 2017
On Thu, 2017-04-20 at 10:26 +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 9:55 PM, James Bottomley
> <James.Bottomley at hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> > Isn't it easy? The Maintainers summit is going to be part of a
> > larger kernel track within LinuxCon EU (not that everyone plans on
> > staying on, of course, but several will be). Just put the bitch at
> > Maintainers session in that as a round table, so any attendee of
> > LinuxCon EU can come and complain if they want to.
>
> I don't think it's that easy. I guess due to the "interesting" stuff
> we're doing in drm I get to hear some of the frustration stories from
> leaf contributors. Picking a conference means you exclude folks who
> won't go there (and Linux is so huge that there's simply no single
> conference that would cover it all),
Well, that's a reason for never doing anything at a conference, yes.
However, the other way to look at it is that if the Maintainer summit
rotates between US, EU and Asia and is allied to a tech conference in
each, then we have a continent-local venue covering most of the world.
So the argument isn't that this is a perfect solution, but that it's a
good one because it gives people the opportunity to come and give
feedback without having to have an invitation to the Maintainer summit.
> but more important a common theme I'm hearing is that frustrated
> folks don't want to speak up in public, because if they piss of their
> maintainer, their problems just get worse.
So perhaps they might turn up to give it privately.
> On the other hand they lack the power and influence to fix
> anything, so there's very little upside to speaking up about issues.
> The usual solution seems to eventually just quietly abandon upstream,
> or at least the particular subsystem.
Empowerment is about giving people opportunities. I find most people
take them. The fact that a few people may not avail themselves isn't a
good reason for not trying.
> The other thing is that because Linuxcon has such a wide audience you
> might just get the peanut gallery kernel bashing from bystanders, not
> feedback from actual (or at least potential) contributors.
On that reasoning, we should abandon democracy immediately.
James
> Still worth trying I guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's
> not much coming out of such a feedback session.
> -Daniel
More information about the Ksummit-discuss
mailing list