Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

Ben Myers
2013-11-08T20:46:09Z

Hey Christoph,

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 11:34:24AM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 12:03:37PM -0600, Ben Myers wrote:
> > Mark is replacing Alex as my backup because Alex is really busy at
> > Linaro and asked to be taken off awhile ago. The holiday season is
> > coming up and I fully intend to go off my meds, turn in to Fonzy the
> > bear, and eat my hat. I need someone to watch the shop while I'm off
> > exploring on Mars. I trust Mark to do that because he is totally
> > awesome.
>
>
> Doing this as an unilateral decisions is not something that will win you
> a fan base.

It's posted for review.

> While we never had anything reassembling a democracy in Linux Kernel
> development making decisions without even contacting the major
> contributor is wrong, twice so if the maintainer is a relatively minor
> contributor to start with.
>
> Just because it recent came up elsewhere I'd like to recite the
> definition from Trond here again:
>
> http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2012-discuss/2012-June/000066.html
>
> By many of the creative roles enlisted there it's clear that Dave should
> be the maintainer. He's been the main contributor and chief architect
> for XFS for many year, while the maintainers came and went at the mercy
> of SGI. This is not meant to bad mouth either of you as I think you're
> doing a reasonably good job compared to other maintainers, but at the
> same time the direction is set by other people that have a much longer
> involvement with the project, and having them officially in control
> would help us forward a lot. It would also avoid having to spend
> considerable resources to train every new generation of SGI maintainer.
>
> Coming to and end I would like to maintain Dave Chinner as the primary
> XFS maintainer for all the work he has done as biggest contributor and
> architect of XFS since longer than I can remember, and I would love to
> retain Ben Myers as a co-maintainer for all the good work he has done
> maintaining and reviewing patches since November 2011.

I think we're doing a decent job too. So thanks for that much at least. ;)

> I would also like to use this post as a public venue to condemn the
> unilateral smokey backroom decisions about XFS maintainership that SGI is
> trying to enforce on the community.

That really didn't happen Christoph. It's not in my tree or in a pull request.

Linus, let me know what you want to do. I do think we're doing a fair job over
here, and (geez) I'm just trying to add Mark as my backup since Alex is too
busy. I know the RH people want more control, and that's understandable, but
they really don't need to replace me to get their code in. Ouch.

Thanks,
Ben