Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

Dave Airlie
2023-08-22T04:07:44Z

On Tue, 22 Aug 2023 at 05:24, Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 8/19/23 08:45, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors
> > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review.
> >
> > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we
> > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason.
> > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their
> > upstream work.
>
> Hi,
>
> For some drive-by or would-be reviewers, at least, I think part of the
> problem is perverse or misaligned incentives.
>
> If you write code and your patches are accepted in the kernel, it counts
> towards your commit count, which is a metric that people look at, for
> better or worse (probably worse).

You have to create some sort of market I suppose, where people have to
work in a community to get their own patches reviewed by other people
who aren't incentivised by their management to review patches.

I don't think there's a nice way to do it, anyone wanting patches
merged needs to review patches from others, and vice-versa, it's good
if you have multiple submissions of the same sort of driver features
at the same time which happens often, then they cross work.

The whole "hardware I don't have" thing is a misnomer, nobody expects
you or reviewers to know how to program the hardware, but they do
expect you to understand how to interface a driver to the kernel, know
what good code patterns to use and when a new submission does
something completely unexpected then senior maintainers need to get
involved to push back.

Dave.