Re: [Ksummit-discuss] "Maintainer summit" invitation discussion

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

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@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