Re: [RFC 5/7] Docs: Expectations for bug reporters and maintainers

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On 04/17/2013 01:23:28 PM, Sarah Sharp wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 09:15:06PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On 04/15/2013 12:33:34 PM, Sarah Sharp wrote:
> > >Outline how often it's polite to ping kernel maintainers about
> > >bugs, and
> > >suggest that kernel maintainers should respond to bugs in 1 to 5
> > >business days.
> >
> > Is there anything in here about the four-level nature of modern
> > maintainership?
> >
> > Patches go from the developer, to the maintainer, to one of Linus's
> > lieutenants, to Linus himself. If you submit a patch to a maintainer
> > they owe you a response. The lieutenant (subsystem maintainer) owes
> > that maintainer a response, and Linus (the project's architect) owes
> > the lieutenant a response.
> 
> Do we want to go into this much detail in a document meant for
> frustrated bug reporters?  Or perhaps we should create a separate
> document about the kernel maintainer hierarchy and reference it here?

My point was that you have to contact the right person to semi-reliably  
get a response, but you're right. That's more about getting patches in  
than getting problems reproduced and diagnosed.

> Also, please note that I'm writing this from the perspective of a  
> driver
> maintainer.  I'm not sure if we've met face to face. :)

Pretty sure we haven't. (You helped me debug a weird usb3 issue once  
via email.)

> > Linus does not owe you, personally, a response. Neither do the
> > subsystem maintainers if you approach them directly with something
> > that should have gone through one of the hundreds of domain-specific
> > maintainers out of the Maintainers file. So the point of going to
> > the right people in sequence and getting their review and
> > signed-off-by lines is to ensure you don't sit there listening to
> > crickets chirping while your patch is ignored. (If you approach
> > Linus directly you may randomly _get_ a response, but there's no
> > guarantee, and usually you won't because he's really busy.)
> 
> This file is about bug reporting, not submitting patches.  I rewrote
...
> TLDR version: Yes, it would be nice if bug reporters could go up the
> hierarchy, but they don't have an easy way to know which subsystem
> maintainers to contact.  Perhaps a new line in MAINTAINERS for the
> subsystem maintainer would be helpful?

Eh, this has gone undocumented for a full decade and nobody but me's  
cared. It seemed related at the time (general interacting with the  
kernel developers), but I guess not.

Rob