Re: RFC improving amount of content in 5.11

[Tom Rix <trix@redhat.com>]

On 9/14/20 2:10 PM, Moritz Fischer wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 01:29:47PM -0700, Tom Rix wrote:
>> I am disappointed with how little content is making it into 5.10
> One comment I've gotten from Greg in the past is to not hold on to
> patches so long, so the pull request this weekend was me trying to a
> first set of changes out there. This doesn't mean it has to be the only
> content that goes into 5.10 (Note how the pull request said: "First set
> of changes for the 5.10 merge window").


Let me try to explain why I am asking for input on how to improve the amount of content.

The rough planning i do in my head.  A release is about 2-3 months.

A non trival change takes 8 revisions, with about 1 week per revision.

Gives us 1 or 2 changes per release.

In the easy case, a new card is in the same family, will have 4 new ip blocks

and a change to glue it all together change, 5 patch sets.

So we can handle 1 or 2 cards year.

But if we can cut the review down to 2 weeks, we could do maybe 5-10 cards per year.


Then the downside if we do not keep up.

every card has a custom out of tree driver available on a limited set of distros.

which i believe is the current state of things.


>
>> So I was wondering what we can do generally and i can do specifically
>> to improve this.
>>
>> My comment
>> Though we are a low volume list, anything non trivial takes about 8 revisions.
>> My suggestion is that we all try to give the developer our big first
>> pass review within a week of the patch landing and try to cut the
>> revisions down to 3.
> It's unfortunate that it takes so long to get things moving, I agree,
> but with everything that's going on - bear in mind people deal different
> with situations like the present - it is what it is.
>
> My current dayjob doesn't pay me for working on this so the time I dedicate
> to this comes out of my spare time and weekends - Personally I'd rather
> not burn out and keep functioning in the long run.

I understand, in the past i have worked as a maintainer when it was not my day job, it's hard.

I am fortunate, fpga kernel and userspace is my day job.  Over the last couple of months, i have been

consistently spending a couple hours a day fixing random kernel problems as well as getting linux-fpga

reviews out within a day or two so i know i have the bandwidth to devote.


So I am asking what else can I do ?

Would helping out with staging the PR's be help ?

Could i move up to a maintainer ?

Tom

> Thanks,
> Moritz
>