XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ric Wheeler]

In the XFS community, we have 2 clear leaders in terms of contributions of 
significant feaures and depth of knowledge - Christoph and Dave.

If you look at the number of patches submitted by developers since 3.0 who have 
more than 10 patches, we get the following:

     319 Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
     163 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
      51 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
      35 Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      34 Author: Chandra Seetharaman <sekharan@us.ibm.com>
      29 Author: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
      28 Author: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
      25 Author: Zhi Yong Wu <wuzhy@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
      24 Author: Jeff Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
      21 Author: Jie Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
      20 Author: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
      16 Author: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
      12 Author: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
      12 Author: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>

If we as a community had more capacity for patch review, Dave's numbers would 
have jumped up even higher :)

It is certainly very welcome to bring new developers into our community, but if 
we are going to add a co-maintainer for XFS, we really need to have one of our 
two leading developers in that role.

Best regards,

Ric



On 11/07/2013 09:23 PM, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> Hi Ben,
>
> How exactly did we decide to add a new co-maintainer? Shouldn't we have some 
> discussion on the list and see some substantial history of contributions?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Ric
>
>
> On 11/07/2013 05:08 PM, Mark Tinguely wrote:
>> Updated maintainer info.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>
>> Reviewed-by: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
>> ---
>>  MAINTAINERS |    2 +-
>>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>>
>> Index: b/MAINTAINERS
>> ===================================================================
>> --- a/MAINTAINERS    2013-11-07 15:42:04.554561805 -0600
>> +++ b/MAINTAINERS    2013-11-07 15:42:59.034889770 -0600
>> @@ -9388,7 +9388,7 @@ F:    drivers/xen/*swiotlb*
>>  XFS FILESYSTEM
>>  P:    Silicon Graphics Inc
>>  M:    Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>
>> -M:    Alex Elder <elder@kernel.org>
>> +M:    Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
>>  M:    xfs@oss.sgi.com
>>  L:    xfs@oss.sgi.com
>>  W:    http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> xfs mailing list
>> xfs@oss.sgi.com
>> http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
>
> _______________________________________________
> xfs mailing list
> xfs@oss.sgi.com
> http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ben Myers]

Hey Ric,

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 06:03:41AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> In the XFS community, we have 2 clear leaders in terms of
> contributions of significant feaures and depth of knowledge -
> Christoph and Dave.
> 
> If you look at the number of patches submitted by developers since
> 3.0 who have more than 10 patches, we get the following:
> 
>     319 Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
>     163 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
>      51 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
>      35 Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
>      34 Author: Chandra Seetharaman <sekharan@us.ibm.com>
>      29 Author: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
>      28 Author: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
>      25 Author: Zhi Yong Wu <wuzhy@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
>      24 Author: Jeff Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
>      21 Author: Jie Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
>      20 Author: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
>      16 Author: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
>      12 Author: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
>      12 Author: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>
> 
> If we as a community had more capacity for patch review, Dave's
> numbers would have jumped up even higher :)
> 
> It is certainly very welcome to bring new developers into our
> community, but if we are going to add a co-maintainer for XFS, we
> really need to have one of our two leading developers in that role.

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.

-Ben

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ric Wheeler]

On 11/08/2013 01:03 PM, Ben Myers wrote:
> Hey Ric,
>
> On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 06:03:41AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>> In the XFS community, we have 2 clear leaders in terms of
>> contributions of significant feaures and depth of knowledge -
>> Christoph and Dave.
>>
>> If you look at the number of patches submitted by developers since
>> 3.0 who have more than 10 patches, we get the following:
>>
>>      319 Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
>>      163 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
>>       51 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
>>       35 Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
>>       34 Author: Chandra Seetharaman <sekharan@us.ibm.com>
>>       29 Author: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
>>       28 Author: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
>>       25 Author: Zhi Yong Wu <wuzhy@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
>>       24 Author: Jeff Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
>>       21 Author: Jie Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
>>       20 Author: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
>>       16 Author: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
>>       12 Author: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
>>       12 Author: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>
>>
>> If we as a community had more capacity for patch review, Dave's
>> numbers would have jumped up even higher :)
>>
>> It is certainly very welcome to bring new developers into our
>> community, but if we are going to add a co-maintainer for XFS, we
>> really need to have one of our two leading developers in that role.
> 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.
>
> -Ben

I don't mean any disrepect to you or to Mark, but maintainership is something 
that you earn over time by proving yourself in the community as a developer and 
a leader of the technology on a personal level.

It is not something that gets managed by the community of developers and has the 
key role of keeping the most frequent developers engaged and happy.  That has 
not been working for us as a community lately.

Dave Chinner is the obvious person to take on the maintainer role as someone who 
has an order of magnitude more code contributed than either of you (even combined).

Christoph, if he has time, would also be an excellent candidate.

Regards,

Ric

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Christoph Hellwig]

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.

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 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.

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ben Myers]

Hey Ric,

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 01:09:32PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 11/08/2013 01:03 PM, Ben Myers wrote:
> >Hey Ric,
> >
> >On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 06:03:41AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> >>In the XFS community, we have 2 clear leaders in terms of
> >>contributions of significant feaures and depth of knowledge -
> >>Christoph and Dave.
> >>
> >>If you look at the number of patches submitted by developers since
> >>3.0 who have more than 10 patches, we get the following:
> >>
> >>     319 Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
> >>     163 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
> >>      51 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
> >>      35 Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
> >>      34 Author: Chandra Seetharaman <sekharan@us.ibm.com>
> >>      29 Author: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
> >>      28 Author: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
> >>      25 Author: Zhi Yong Wu <wuzhy@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> >>      24 Author: Jeff Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
> >>      21 Author: Jie Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
> >>      20 Author: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
> >>      16 Author: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
> >>      12 Author: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
> >>      12 Author: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>
> >>
> >>If we as a community had more capacity for patch review, Dave's
> >>numbers would have jumped up even higher :)
> >>
> >>It is certainly very welcome to bring new developers into our
> >>community, but if we are going to add a co-maintainer for XFS, we
> >>really need to have one of our two leading developers in that role.
> >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.
> >
> >-Ben
> 
> I don't mean any disrepect to you or to Mark,
       
Don't worry about it, I have plenty to spare.  ;P

> but maintainership is
> something that you earn over time by proving yourself in the
> community as a developer and a leader of the technology on a
> personal level.
>
> It is not something that gets managed by the community of developers
> and has the key role of keeping the most frequent developers engaged
> and happy.  That has not been working for us as a community lately.
> 
> Dave Chinner is the obvious person to take on the maintainer role as
> someone who has an order of magnitude more code contributed than
> either of you (even combined).
> 
> Christoph, if he has time, would also be an excellent candidate.

Eric is also a good choice.  I'd be happy to add all three.

-Ben

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ric Wheeler]

On 11/08/2013 02:34 PM, 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.
>
> 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.

This sounds like exactly the right thing to do to me as well,

Ric

>
> 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.
>
>


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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ben Myers]

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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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ric Wheeler]

On 11/08/2013 03:46 PM, Ben Myers wrote:
> 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

Christoph is not a Red Hat person.

Jeff is from Oracle.

This is not a Red Hat vs SGI thing, Dave simply has earned the right to take on 
the formal leadership role of maintainer.

Regards,

Ric

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Phil White]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 06:03:41AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> In the XFS community, we have 2 clear leaders in terms of
> contributions of significant feaures and depth of knowledge -
> Christoph and Dave.
> 
> If you look at the number of patches submitted by developers since
> 3.0 who have more than 10 patches, we get the following:
> 
>     319 Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
>     163 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
>      51 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
>      35 Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
>      34 Author: Chandra Seetharaman <sekharan@us.ibm.com>
>      29 Author: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
>      28 Author: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
>      25 Author: Zhi Yong Wu <wuzhy@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
>      24 Author: Jeff Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
>      21 Author: Jie Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
>      20 Author: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
>      16 Author: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
>      12 Author: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
>      12 Author: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>
> 
> If we as a community had more capacity for patch review, Dave's
> numbers would have jumped up even higher :)
> 
> It is certainly very welcome to bring new developers into our
> community, but if we are going to add a co-maintainer for XFS, we
> really need to have one of our two leading developers in that role.

I don't have a dog in this fight, so I'm going to give my opinion on the
matter.  You guys can fight it out.

I'm not really sure why amount of code contributed implies good
maintainership.  Over our professional lives, I'm sure that we've worked
with a lot of people who couldn't write code worth beans who maintained
the source competently.

I'm not sure why the title is being bandied about as an honorific.  It's
not the America's Cup and having a title passed around because of a particular
metric seems counterproductive.

Ben has obvious -- and good -- reasons for choosing Mark.  Not only does
he have an office right nearby, but Mark has done excellent work and he's been
pretty enthusiastic while doing it.

To my mind, easy access to co-maintainers implies that it's a lot easier to
share knowledge and coordinate -- isn't that where the "co-" part of
"co-maintainer" comes from?

It's expected that some people are going to be in different time zones in an
open source project.  But as I'm sure we can all attest, it's a bear to
coordinate with people who are a great many hours off from your time zone.

If I remember correctly, Dave's in Australia and Christoph's in Germany.  If
we're going to have a small number of maintainers, I can see the logic in
having them be on the same continent and within a few time zones.

-Phil

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Carlos Maiolino]

Hi,

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 01:29:09PM -0800, Phil White wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 06:03:41AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > In the XFS community, we have 2 clear leaders in terms of
> > contributions of significant feaures and depth of knowledge -
> > Christoph and Dave.
> > 
> > If you look at the number of patches submitted by developers since
> > 3.0 who have more than 10 patches, we get the following:
> > 
> > If we as a community had more capacity for patch review, Dave's
> > numbers would have jumped up even higher :)
> > 
> > It is certainly very welcome to bring new developers into our
> > community, but if we are going to add a co-maintainer for XFS, we
> > really need to have one of our two leading developers in that role.
> 
> I don't have a dog in this fight, so I'm going to give my opinion on the
> matter.  You guys can fight it out.
> 
> I'm not really sure why amount of code contributed implies good
> maintainership.  Over our professional lives, I'm sure that we've worked
> with a lot of people who couldn't write code worth beans who maintained
> the source competently.
> 

I agree, the amount of code doesn't mean the person will be a good maintainer,
but I believe Ric's point here was due the knowledge of the project as a whole
and that there were not information on the XFS list regarding the chose of a new
maintainter, and, this is not the first time SGI bypasses community decisions to
take company decisions in the first place.

Of course, not all developers want the maintenance role	and this is a personal
decision, and, just to make it clear, I have nothing against Mark taking the
co-maintainer role. But I really would appreciate if there were any discussion
on the list about co-maintenance paper and the possibility to other also request
the role.

> I'm not sure why the title is being bandied about as an honorific.  It's
> not the America's Cup and having a title passed around because of a particular
> metric seems counterproductive.
> 
> Ben has obvious -- and good -- reasons for choosing Mark.  Not only does
> he have an office right nearby, but Mark has done excellent work and he's been
> pretty enthusiastic while doing it.
> 
> To my mind, easy access to co-maintainers implies that it's a lot easier to
> share knowledge and coordinate -- isn't that where the "co-" part of
> "co-maintainer" comes from?
> 
> It's expected that some people are going to be in different time zones in an
> open source project.  But as I'm sure we can all attest, it's a bear to
> coordinate with people who are a great many hours off from your time zone.
> 
> If I remember correctly, Dave's in Australia and Christoph's in Germany.  If
> we're going to have a small number of maintainers, I can see the logic in
> having them be on the same continent and within a few time zones.
> 

Regarding the TZ difference. I really don't see any problem on that, but
otherwise, wouldn't be better to have a co-maintainer on a different TZ? So we
can have a mainteiner covering different TZs? 

> -Phil
> 
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-- 
Carlos

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 02:46:06PM -0600, Ben Myers wrote:
> That really didn't happen Christoph.  It's not in my tree or in a pull request.

I'll take my back room complain back then, but I still think that this
is not a useful way to discuss something like this.

> 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.

I'd really like to see more diversity in XFS maintainers.  The SGI focus
has defintively been an issue again and again because it seems when one
SGI person is too busy the others usually are as well. As mentioned
before there's also been historically a way too high turnover, with the
associated transition pains.

By making sure we have a broader base for the maintainers, and a more
open infrastructure we'll all win.  Note that we already had that sort
of instructure on kernel.org, but gave up on it because many people
perceived the effort to re-gain the kernel.org accounts to high.

I would also really like to get a clarification on "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".  What specific people are you
worried about an what code?  What makes "the RH people" less worthy
to their code in than "the SGI" people.

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Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ben Myers]

Hey,

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 09:32:53AM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 02:46:06PM -0600, Ben Myers wrote:
> > That really didn't happen Christoph.  It's not in my tree or in a pull request.
> 
> I'll take my back room complain back then, but I still think that this
> is not a useful way to discuss something like this.

Thanks.  Tact, Ben, Tact.  ;)

> > 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.
> 
> I'd really like to see more diversity in XFS maintainers.  The SGI focus has
> defintively been an issue again and again because it seems when one SGI
> person is too busy the others usually are as well.  As mentioned before
> there's also been historically a way too high turnover, with the associated
> transition pains.

I think diversity in XFS maintainers is a great idea.  How wide of a net are
you suggesting we cast?  I guess it sort of depends upon what you feel is the
purpose of the file.
 
> By making sure we have a broader base for the maintainers, and a more open
> infrastructure we'll all win.

Agreed.

> Note that we already had that sort
> of instructure on kernel.org, but gave up on it because many people
> perceived the effort to re-gain the kernel.org accounts to high.

It is a little difficult to find your way into the web of trust.  Not everyone
is in a position to make way to a conference, or to meet people in person.  And
even then it can be intimidating to ask for a signature.
 
> I would also really like to get a clarification on "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".  What specific people are you worried about
> an what code?  What makes "the RH people" less worthy to their code in than
> "the SGI" people.

I'm convinced we're having this discussion for the right reasons, so let's let
that line of discussion die where it is.  

Regards,
	Ben

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