Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

Miguel Ojeda
2023-08-17T13:56:55Z

On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 2:42 PM Laurent Pinchart
<laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote:
>
> I think the rules will need to be somehow flexible. As Jani mentioned,
> there's a genuine need to be able to discuss design questions before a
> patch series reaches perfection (experienced developers will usually
> know that they should mark their series as RFC in that case, but
> newcomers may not have this tribal knowledge). On the other hand, I'm
> not going to discuss the design behind a patch series if the code is
> intended with 3 spaces and uses CamelCase.
>
> Reports from automated tests, or automated reviews, should be designed
> to help the submitter, not to scold and discourage them. I'm pretty sure
> we can come up with wording that will be nicer to read than what I would
> write when being tired at 3:00am, repeating the same comment for the
> 50th time.

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 would already save a ton of time for reviewers, and it would help
new contributors understand the requirements.

However, a worry that I have about such a system is if people start to
spam unprepared patches until they pass. If that becomes a problem,
then a possible solution could be to have a staging list for that (or
server or similar).

Cheers,
Miguel