Re: [Ksummit-discuss] Topics for the Maintainer's Summit

Olof Johansson
2019-09-03T02:35:13Z

On Mon, Sep 2, 2019 at 3:22 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Sep 03, 2019 at 06:42:55AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> > On Friday, 30 August 2019, Bjorn Helgaas <helgaas@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 11:17:20PM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> > > > ...
> > > > Are there some additional topics that you'd like to suggest that we
> > > > discuss at the maintainer's summit?
> > >
> > > I don't have an effective workflow for managing incoming patches. I
> > > use a hodge-podge of patchwork, gmail, mutt, and ugly private scripts
> > > to put patches on topic branches, review them, polish them, merge them
> > > together into a "-next" branch, generate pull requests, etc.
> > >
> > > I wish there were a collection of the workflows and scripts people
> > > use, maybe even in the kernel sources so they could be shared and
> > > improved. Some short screencasts could help visualize and pull things
> > > together. I know a lot of this stuff is "out there" somewhere, but
> > > I'm not aware of any organized collection.
> >
> >
> > These are quite drm specific but they do mean myself and Daniel can operate
> > seamlessly, and all i915 and drm misc maintainers and committers use the
> > same enforced workflow. We hope to move to gitlab at some point and may try
> > and use the same interface or not.
> >
> > https://drm.pages.freedesktop.org/maintainer-tools/index.html
> >
> > Happy to give more info at maintainer summit, but we have gotten negative
> > feedback in the past from some community members who wanted to point out at
> > length that drm didnt invent group maintainership first, i still have no
> > idea of the relevancy of the comment.
>
> Are there are other people who have interest in sharing their
> workflow? I'm wonder if it might be useful to schedule time during
> the kernel summit, so it's open for more people to benefit from this
> sharing? (Also note that Kernel Summit track sessions will be video
> taped for posterity, while Maintainer Summit discussions are *not*
> recorded.)

Sharing workflow sessions are a repeating theme, but I think there's
still a good amount of interest in them since things change over time,
and there's always a lot to learn from how others deal with things.

I've found that sharing exact tool suites tends to be hard, people are
often comfortable with the pile-of-scripts they have. But there's
still value in seeing how others have solved things, and borrow ideas
or pieces of the workflow.

Steven's ktest that's in the kernel tree is a good example -- I like
the idea, but it didn't do quite what I needed, and it was easier to
just roll my own back when I first looked at using it. It doesn't mean
others won't reuse it 100%, and it doesn't mean it's not a good idea
to share them.

I agree that it's probably a great idea to do on the wider KS forum
instead, for wider audience. Maybe a BoF-style talk with show-and-tell
and/or others also showing what and how they do it is useful?

-Olof