From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S934912Ab3DQXtt (ORCPT ); Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:49:49 -0400 Received: from mail-ia0-f181.google.com ([209.85.210.181]:51538 "EHLO mail-ia0-f181.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753342Ab3DQXtq convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:49:46 -0400 Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:49:40 -0500 From: Rob Landley Subject: Re: [RFC 5/7] Docs: Expectations for bug reporters and maintainers To: Sarah Sharp Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, Linus Torvalds In-Reply-To: <20130417182328.GA7690@xanatos> (from sarah.a.sharp@linux.intel.com on Wed Apr 17 13:23:28 2013) X-Mailer: Balsa 2.4.11 Message-Id: <1366242580.18069.116@driftwood> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; DelSp=Yes; Format=Flowed Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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