Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Coping with the new-developer flood

[Matthieu Baerts <matttbe@kernel.org>]

Hi Jon,

On 06/08/2026 01:26, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Do we need some sort of more organized onboarding structure and, if so,
> are we able to create and sustain it?

Good idea to find solutions to reduce the training load on maintainers!

> At a minimum, one could imagine a bot that notices a patch posted by
> somebody who has not been seen before and responds with a "Welcome!
> Here's how we do things here" email.

FYI, that's what the Netdev maintainers are already doing to cope with
the high load:

https://github.com/linux-netdev/nipa/blob/main/ml-agent/form-letters/welcome

This part should be re-usable to work on other trees, monitoring other
mailing lists (public-inboxes to be precise). But I guess it would be
easier to have something global, instead of asking each subtree
maintainer to set all that up.

> In a better-funded world, we could

So many things we could do in this world :)

(BTW, that's a shame there is no "kernel foundation" within the Linux
Foundation, where the TAB could quickly allocate budgets to improve
various things, helping maintainers in different areas like tooling, CI,
funding, local AI, documentation, regression, etc. But that's another
subject :) )

Cheers,
Matt
-- 
Sponsored by the NGI0 Core fund.