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

Joe Perches joe at perches.com
Fri Sep 21 16:05:15 UTC 2018


On Tue, 2018-09-11 at 17:02 +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> - Talk about the maintainer. If no one wants to help out, but it's a
> generally active area, there's a problem. Fairly often it's a human
> problem, and the maintainer is blind to their own short-comings. This
> is very tricky, and requires enormous amounts of empathy and time, but
> can be rectified.

Somewhat dubious assertion.  Perhaps more often it is a
generally active but somewhat isolated subsystem that few
take an interest in.

> Looking at drivers/rtc over the past 2-3 years it seems like a
> decently active subsystem. Probably on the small side of things, but
> not catastrophically so. But looking at contributor stats the picture
> is totally different:
> 
>    241  Alexandre Belloni
>     28  Linus Torvalds
>     27  Arnd Bergmann
>     25  Javier Martinez Canillas
>     20  Uwe Kleine-König
> 
> That kind of skewed contribution statistics is indeed not sustainable,
> and indicates some serious problem imo.

It's not necessarily serious.

A single active maintainer is well capable of maintaining
a subsystem as long as it's somewhat contained.

It is curious though that one of the nominal maintainers,
Alessandro Zummo, has not signed any single commit since
2015 though.

> What exactly goes wrong, and
> how to best fix it I can't tell without more information though. From
> my experience in drm, where we also have some areas with highly skewed
> contribution statistics, it could be the maintainer driving people
> away, ensuring that there's only one-off contributions. Usually
> unkowningly.

Possible, but one-off contributions skew noisily today to
trivial whitespace and checkpatch/clang warning updates.

It generally requires an advanced knowledge of a subsystem
to be able to make substantive or even non-trivial changes.



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