Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-18T15:30:40Z

(CC'ing Greg)

On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 07:41:43PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 5:03 PM Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 03:56:43PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
> >
> > > I think the bot should simply reply commenting on the issues it has
> > > found, without judging whether the patch should or should not be
> > > reviewed (and the bot could perhaps explicitly say so to avoid
> > > submitters getting discouraged).
> > >
> > > Then, depending on what the bot finds, i.e. the amount and kind of
> > > issues, reviewers can decide and reply as needed. RFC patches could be
> > > skipped by the bot.
> >
> > This defeats a little bit the point of lowering the workload of
> > reviewers though, if they have to review each bot report and reply to it
> > manually :-)
>
> No, it does not. The point is that you don't need to point out trivial
> mistakes anymore, nor devote time to find them.
>
> Just by judging the length of the bot's reply and the importance of
> the spotted issues, you can make an assessment.

But you'll still need to reply to the submitter to tell what to expect.
As far as I understand, this was considered enough of an issue by Greg
to be automated to remove even the human need to push a button, see
https://github.com/gregkh/gregkh-linux/blob/master/forms/patch_bot.

> And, of course, you can also group particular issues as "no-go", so
> that the bot already says there needs to be most likely a new version
> (e.g. no SoB, no license, no commit message, bad formatting, build
> errors...), suited to the particular subsystem.

That would work for me, and I think that's essentially what Greg's bot
does.

--
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart