Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-21T16:04:03Z

On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 05:10:07PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:26:29PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:
>
> > > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little
> > > bit.
> > > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you
> > > will review and also merge their stuff in return.
> > > Sometimes this works.
> > > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full
> > > time on similar things, yay! So much support.
> > > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well.
> > > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to
> > > review and you feel like begging.
> > > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed.
>
> > I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's
> > certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking
> > contributors to review patches that are directly related to their
> > business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company
> > to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their
> > patches. The contributor helped with reviewing third-party contributions
> > to the driver they're actively working on. When I asked for help
> > reviewing an entirely separate driver that their employer had no
> > business interest in, however, I faced the "we're busy and don't have
> > time" argument.
> >
> > Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to
> > expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources,
> > to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in
> > their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest.
>
> That issue with people having the background knowledge needed to
> adequately review things they don't have specific experience with can be
> a problem here. It's not typically *harmful* other than issues with
> people doing disproportionately pedantic reviews (which can be a
> problem) but you do still need to keep an eye on things it can feel a
> bit make work so there's a balance with making it an explicit
> requirement.

Most of my reviews point of issues with usage of in-kernel and userspace
APIs, rather than problems specific to the hardware at hand. Developers
who contribute drivers with similar usage patterns of APIs should be
able to help there.

--
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart