Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

Ric Wheeler
2013-11-08T21:13:09Z

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