Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

Carlos Maiolino
2013-11-11T11:34:35Z

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