Re: [LSFMMBPF TOPIC] Killing LSFMMBPF

James Bottomley
2020-03-06T16:15:16Z

On Fri, 2020-03-06 at 09:35 -0500, Josef Bacik wrote:
> Many people have suggested this elsewhere, but I think we really need
> to seriously consider it. Most of us all go to the Linux Plumbers
> conference. We could accomplish our main goals with Plumbers without
> having to deal with all of the above problems.

[I'm on the Plumbers PC, but not speaking for them, just making general
observations based on my long history helping to run Plumbers]

Plumbers has basically reached the size where we can't realistically
expand without moving to the bigger venues and changing our evening
events ... it's already been a huge struggle in Lisbon and Halifax
trying to find a Restaurant big enough for the closing party.

The other reason for struggling to keep Plumbers around 500 is that the
value of simply running into people and having an accidental hallway
track, which is seen as a huge benefit of plumbers, starts diminishing.
In fact, having a working hallway starts to become a problem as well
as we go up in numbers (plus in that survey we keep sending out those
who reply don't want plumbers to grow too much in size).

The other problem is content: you're a 3 day 4 track event and we're a
3 day 6 track event. We get enough schedule angst from 6 tracks ... 10
would likely become hugely difficult. If we move to 5 days, we'd have
to shove the Maintainer Summit on the Weekend (you can explain that one
to Linus) but we'd still be in danger of the day 4 burn out people used
to complain about when OLS and KS were co-located.

So, before you suggest Plumbers as the magic answer consider that the
problems you cite below don't magically go away, they just become
someone else's headache.

That's not to say this isn't a good idea, it's just to execute it we'd
have to transform Plumbers and we should have a community conversation
about that involving the current Plumbers PC before deciding it's the
best option.

James