Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>]

Hey Ric,

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 01:09:32PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 11/08/2013 01:03 PM, Ben Myers wrote:
> >Hey Ric,
> >
> >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:
> >>
> >>     319 Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
> >>     163 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
> >>      51 Author: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
> >>      35 Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
> >>      34 Author: Chandra Seetharaman <sekharan@us.ibm.com>
> >>      29 Author: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
> >>      28 Author: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
> >>      25 Author: Zhi Yong Wu <wuzhy@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> >>      24 Author: Jeff Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
> >>      21 Author: Jie Liu <jeff.liu@oracle.com>
> >>      20 Author: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
> >>      16 Author: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
> >>      12 Author: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
> >>      12 Author: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>
> >>
> >>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.
> >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.
> >
> >-Ben
> 
> I don't mean any disrepect to you or to Mark,
       
Don't worry about it, I have plenty to spare.  ;P

> but maintainership is
> something that you earn over time by proving yourself in the
> community as a developer and a leader of the technology on a
> personal level.
>
> It is not something that gets managed by the community of developers
> and has the key role of keeping the most frequent developers engaged
> and happy.  That has not been working for us as a community lately.
> 
> Dave Chinner is the obvious person to take on the maintainer role as
> someone who has an order of magnitude more code contributed than
> either of you (even combined).
> 
> Christoph, if he has time, would also be an excellent candidate.

Eric is also a good choice.  I'd be happy to add all three.

-Ben