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

[Jani Nikula]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2018, Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni at bootlin.com> wrote:
> On 13/09/2018 14:08:11+0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:
>> All the knowledge they built, experience they got (including at
>> reviewing) is gone, possibly forever, and there's no one to pick up
>> the subsystem, and the code is left to rot.
>
> And this is almost the same for the DRM core where Daniel is by far the
> top contributor.

Except he's no longer a maintainer in either DRM or i915. Checking the
stats against current MAINTAINERS will paint you a different picture.

And that brings us to another important point: Group maintainership
allows for easier onboarding of new maintainers, and easier retirement
of old ones. We've changed several maintainers for both the drm-misc
tree and i915 since we've switched to group maintainership, and there
hasn't been noticeable bumps in the road. Mostly just business as
usual. Being a maintainer doesn't have to be for life, and you don't
have to burn out and rage quit one fine day and leave everything in
ruins behind you as you go.

I'm not saying one size fits all, and I'm not saying it's easy to find
more maintainers. But it's certainly much *much* easier to find a new
co-maintainer to a team of two or three than a new solo maintainer.

BR,
Jani.


-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center