Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

Krzysztof Kozlowski
2023-08-25T07:05:35Z

On 24/08/2023 23:30, Jonathan Cameron wrote:
>>>> We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well
>>>> via positive/negative scores:
>>>> https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/
>>>>
>>>> It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume
>>>> that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews.
>>>> Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that
>>>> reviewing other patches will help them land their own.
>>>
>>> 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.
>
> Personally I like to point out to our kernel teams that if a maintainer
> is ignoring you (too busy), the best thing is to help (guilt trip) them
> by reviewing anything else you can find they haven't gotten to yet.
> Added 'benefit' beyond learning more about the area is you often end
> suggesting changes for the other outstanding patches resulting a new version
> of their patches that is further down in patchwork or similar so maintainer
> tends to get to yours quicker...

I'll start responding with this to pings on LKML. I think Greg already
does for some cases.

Best regards,
Krzysztof