[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] community management/subsystem governance

[Jani Nikula]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2018, Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni at bootlin.com> wrote:
> Most of the drivers are developed by their maintainer or someone paid
> by the vendor (which is basically the same because the maintainer is
> actually getting paid to get his colleagues patches upstream).
>
> I also see that the review numbers hint at biased reviews for the big
> drivers as they are not coming from outsiders.
>
> So what I see in DRM is exactly what you despis in other areas of the
> kernel: mostly unreviewed maintainer self commits.

I'll only speak for drm/i915 here as one of its maintainers, and I'll
steer clear of the preceding debate, but your conclusions don't hold
water wrt drm/i915.

Sure, most of the contributions, both patches and review, come from paid
Intel developers. It's a very busy driver. We pushed just under 8
commits per day on the average in the v4.4..v4.18 range. For reference,
that's 6.6% of all of drivers/. More than sound/, a bit less than fs/ or
net/ top level directories, but in the same ballpark.

By our rules, *nobody* gets to push unreviewed patches, and we follow
that religiously. The more complicated the patch, the more rigorous the
review must be, involving domain experts or generally more sets of eyes.

If we had to rely on outside reviews, either our rate of change would
grind to a halt, or we'd have to loosen our rules. Instead, we trust our
maintainers and committers to have the integrity to follow our
documented merge criteria. And bypassing the rules would be a fast lane
to losing the maintainer/committer status.

Anyone contributing to drm/i915 will tell you there are no biased
reviews. Some might say we are more gentle towards outside contributors
than our own. I'm also pretty confident you won't find examples of
unreviewed commits, let alone unreviewed maintainer self commits.


BR,
Jani.

-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center