Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

Linus Walleij
2023-08-18T13:55:24Z

Alexei, thanks for returning the conversation
to this very important topic.

On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 1:55 AM Alexei Starovoitov
<alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com> wrote:

> BPF has solid CI that helps a lot, but the maintainer burnout is acutely felt.
> The main reason for burnout is patch flood.

I agree this is an important cause.
Even worse is any kind of social conflict or bad mood in the community.
Science has studied stress, what we mostly run into is called "microstress".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_stress

> The maintainer's day looks like non-stop code review.
> The patch backlog just doesn't end.

I've been there too :(

> 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.

> To address maintainer burnout we need to change the culture of the community
> and transform active developers to active code reviewers.
> We're looking for ideas on how to do that.

I agree.

To deal with the symptoms (feeling stressed) when it gets too much
for me personally I have different coping mechanisms.

The basic idea is to do stuff that generate the opposite of stress.
This could be outside of work, but also working on stuff in the
kernel that gives a feeling of immediate accomplishment and
closure is good.

Such as maintaining some drivers and systems that are old,
so nobody is begging you to fix it now now now. Paying of some
old techical debt. That's nice.

Drilling into a specific bug that is not urgent can also be very
de-stressing, it's hard work but nobody is dependent on you
fixing it now. You don't even need to come up with a solution.

Yours,
Linus Walleij