Re: maintainership of fstests

Darrick J. Wong
2022-03-21T22:59:04Z

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.

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.

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.

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!

--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.