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

[Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com>]

Hi,

On 11/09/2018 00:44:57+0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> gitlab (or well anything with a concept like pull requests) makes the
> 90% so much easier. And it doesn't take more work for contributors if
> you set things up right - it's just a git push instead of a git
> send-email. At least after initial setup is done.
> 
> And at least in a corporate environment (and I kinda have to care
> about that) gitlab wins on the initial setup front hands down against
> email. gitlab only needs https (even for git push/pull), and
> coproporate firewalls are pretty ok with https. They are not ok with
> smtp, like at all. And the amount of time we spend debugging random
> git send-email setup issues is epic.
> 

I would like to chime in and remind you that there are many subsystems
where you get a lot of drive-by contribution from random people. I'm
obviously thinking about rtc but I think this would also apply to codec,
IIO, power/supply, hwmon... In that case any initial setup would be
prohibitive.

I feel like these subsystems are often left to the side when I read
threads like that talking about getting every patches reviewed, doing
more CI, etc...

So I need to emphasise that there are subsystem where people are not
backed by a company to contribute or review. What I often see is someone
having $random hardware and submitting a patch adding support for it.
That developer will definitively not review other patches because he has
no particular interest in them. He also probably doesn't have the
experience to do a review.

It is quite different from having a few big companies with huge teams
each maintaining a single driver in a subsystem... You simply can't have
the same expectations.

-- 
Alexandre Belloni, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com