Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

From: Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: elder@kernel.org, Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>,
	"linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	xfs@oss.sgi.com, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
	Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2013 14:46:06 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20131108204605.GA1935@sgi.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20131108193424.GA11052@infradead.org>

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

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