Re: [RFC PATCH] NFSD: Add a subsystem policy document

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

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 09:56:25AM -0400, Chuck Lever wrote:
> On 9/22/25 3:25 AM, Jeff Layton wrote:
> >> +Community roles and their authority
> >> +-----------------------------------
> >> +The purpose of Linux subsystem communities is to provide active
> >> +stewardship of a narrow set of source files in the Linux kernel.
> >> +This can include managing user space tooling as well.
> >> +
> >> +To contextualize the structure of the Linux NFS community that
> >> +is responsible for stewardship of the NFS server code base, we
> >> +define the community roles here.
> >> +
> >> +One person often takes on more than one of these roles. One role
> >> +can be filled by multiple people. The roles and the people filling
> >> +them are often fluid. Sometimes a person will say "Wearing my XYZ
> >> +hat" -- which means, roughly, "speaking as the person filling the
> >> +XYZ role."
> >> +
> > For completeness, I'd add a "**Maintainer**" section below too.
> 
> Thanks for your comments.
> 
> The role list below actually contains all of the maintainer's tasks,
> so IMHO the list isn't lacking completeness. The list could include a
> "Maintainer" role in the list simply because it's a term we refer
> to in every day conversation... or... I could add a paragraph up front
> that explains that the term "Maintainer" is a combination of these
> roles.

I'm not an nfsd person, but speaking as an ex-maintainer who wrote a
maintainer entry profile doc for xfs, I think what Chuck is trying to do
here is to break up the maintainer duties into well defined roles and
then to encourage *separate* people to own these roles.  Ideally this
will give nfsd participants a sense of shared ownership of the whole
project, and solve some scaling/burnout problems.

The hard part ofc is actually getting companies to encourage their
people to step up, and making it stick.

> (And above, snipped out, the "Key Cycle Dates" section title comes
> from Documentation/maintainer/maintainer-entry-profile.rst. I'll
> think of a more accurate section title).

<shrug> Or you could define some key cycle dates.  Do you want to
require that new feature patchsets must be in the review pipeline before
-rc2 so that you can put whatever passes review into for-next just after
-rc4?  Or specify that bugfixes completing review after -rc6 will just
get rolled into the next merge window?

> >> +- **Contributor** : Anyone who submits a code change, bug fix,
> >> +  recommendation, documentation fix, and so on. A contributor can
> >> +  submit regularly or infrequently.
> >> +
> >> +- **Outside Contributor** : A contributor who is not a regular actor
> >> +  in the Linux NFS community. This can mean someone who contributes
> >> +  to other parts of the kernel, or someone who just noticed a
> >> +  mis-spelling in a comment and sent a patch.
> >> +
> >> +- **Reviewer** : Someone who is named in the MAINTAINERS file as a
> >> +  reviewer is an area expert who can request changes to contributed
> >> +  code, and expects that contributors will address the request.
> >> +
> >> +- **Upstream Release Manager** : This role is responsible for
> >> +  curating contributions into a branch, reviewing test results, and
> >> +  then sending a pull request during merge windows. There is a
> >> +  trust relationship between the release manager and Linus.
> >> +
> >> +- **Bug Triager** : Someone who is a first responder to bug reports
> >> +  submitted to the linux-nfs mailing list or the bugzilla and helps
> >> +  troubleshoot and identify next steps.
> >> +
> >> +- **Testing Lead** : The testing lead builds and runs the test
> >> +  infrastructure for the subsystem. The testing lead can ask for
> >> +  patches to be dropped because of ongoing high defect rates.
> >> +
> >> +- **LTS Maintainer** : The LTS maintainer is responsible for managing
> >> +  the Fixes: and Cc: stable annotations on patches, and seeing that
> >> +  patches that cannot be automatically applied to LTS kernels get
> >> +  proper backports as necessary.
> >> +
> >> +- **Community Manager** : This umpire role can be asked to call balls
> >> +  and strikes during conflicts, but is also responsible for ensuring
> >> +  the health of the relationships within the community and
> >> +  facilitating discussions on long-term topics such as how to manage
> >> +  growing technical debt.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Chuck Lever