Re: Delegating fstests maintenance work (Was: Re: [PATCH 3/4] xfs/{422,517}: add missing killall to _cleanup())

["Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@kernel.org>]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 07:49:29AM +0300, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> [+fsdevel]
> 
> >
> > I swear I'll send all these some day, if I ever get caught up...
> > Delegating LTS maintenance is a big help, but as it is I still can't
> > stay abreast of all the mainline patchsets /and/ send my own stuff. :(
> 
> I have to repeat what I said in LSFMM about the LTP project and
> what fstests could be like.
> 
> Companies put dedicated engineers to work as proactive LTP
> maintainers. There is absolutely no reason that companies won't
> do the same for fstests.
> 
> If only every large corp. that employs >10 fs developers will assign
> a halftime engineer for fstests maintenance, their fs developer's
> work would become so much more productive and their fs product
> will become more reliable.
> 
> I think the fact that this is not happening is a failure on our part to
> communicate that to our managers.

I'd enjoy that too; I'll bring it up the next time they start asking
about budgeting here (which means in 2 weeks).

> From my experience, if you had sent stuff like your fstests cleanups
> to the LTP maintainers and ask for their help to land it, they would
> thank you for the work you did and take care of all the testing
> on all platforms and fixing all the code style and framework issues.

Though to be fair -- a lot of the fstests changes backing up in
djwong-dev exist to enable testing of the online fsck feature.  This
whole year I've deprioritized sending any of those patches to
concentrate on writing the design documentation for online fsck[1].  Now
that I've submitted *that*, I'm hoping to start code review once I
convince a few people to grok the design doc.

So perhaps next week I'll resume the patchbombing that I've become
infamous for doing.

In the mean time, no objections to merging /this/ series.  The group
labelling is a little odd and I think that should be separate fix from
adding _require_freeze), but if zorro's ok with its present form then so
be it.

--D

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/165456652256.167418.912764930038710353.stgit@magnolia/

> LTP maintainers constantly work on improving the framework and
> providing more features to test writers as well as on converting old
> tests to use new infrastructure.
> 
> Stuff like Dave's work on sorting up the cleanup mess or the groups
> cleanup and groups speedup - all of those do not have to add load
> to busy maintainers - life can be different!
> 
> Taking responsibility away from developers to deliver their own tests
> is a slippery slope, but getting help and working together is essential
> for offloading work from busy maintainers.
> 
> Thanks,
> Amir.