Re: maintainership of fstests

Eryu Guan
2022-04-10T16:15:43Z

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 03:13:36PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 01:38:23AM +0800, Eryu Guan wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > It's almost 6 years since I've taken the maintainership of fstests, and
> > I tried my best to keep the pace of weekly update, or at least bi-weekly
> > update due to something like public holidays.
> >
> > But it's been a month since last fstests update due to my personal
> > urgent issues, and some patches got no review for more than one month.
> > So I think it's time to re-consider the maintainership of fstests.
> >
> > I will have less spare time in the foreseeable future, as I have to
> > spend more time on my family, so it's hard to keep the weekly update
> > pace. And six years is a long time, I think it's time to have a new
> > maintainer.
>
> Thank you for your service for all that time! :)
>
> > Or we could go to the group-maintain way? As Darrick mentioned before
> > (for xfs not fstests, if I recall correctly). Then we need a new primary
> > maintainer :)
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> Splitting responsibility for maintenance doesn't seem like a huge step
> to me -- for fs-specific tests, we need the developers for that fs to
> review test changes. Review for tests/generic/ can be done by the
> fs{devel,*} community at large, much as it is done now.

Agreed.

>
> The /difficult/ part, I think, is handling things like treewide
> reorganizations, and integration testing the test suite. That, I think,
> is what really requires a primary maintainer who has broader visibility
> into what's going on.

Agreed.

>
> That primary maintainer also has to have time to run a build-and-test
> farm of all the major fstests clients (ext*, xfs, btrfs, overlay, nfs,
> what else?) to make sure that new code doesn't break existing
> filesystems' ability to test themselves.

Yes, that's what I did when I was at RH, I ran regression tests on all
major filesystems and on all major arches (x86_64 ppc64(le) aarch64)
before pushing new patches to git repo to make sure the new release is
in good shape.

And that's the problem for me now, as I don't have such machine resource
anymore.. And that's what Zorro has now :)

>
> Granted, (speaking only for XFS, probably btrfs, and maybe even ext*),
> we seem to notice regressions pretty fast when we download the weekly
> release, so I think the primary maintainer's focus probably ought to be
> more towards the non-mainstream Linux filesystems.
>
> Also: over the past 6 years, I have /really/ enjoyed the fact that
> fstests has small releases every 1-2 weeks as opposed to larger
> infrequent drops. It's a relief not to have to chase a merge window
> like I do for the kernel. Thank you a bunch for keeping that going!

Thanks for all the help and reviews all these years!

Thanks,
Eryu

>
> --D
>
> FYI: It's Spring Break here in the US, so you might not get much of a
> response for a week or two.
>
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Eryu
> >
> > P.S.
> > I'll keep the maintainer role and do the review & update as usual until
> > all things settle down.