Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] SoC maintainer group

Laurent Pinchart
2018-11-06T23:32:53Z

Hi Olof,

On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 00:16:27 EET Olof Johansson wrote:
> Hi KS organizers (and others),
>
> This is a late topic proposal, hopefully there is still time on the agenda.
>
> We’ve recently been discussing some maintainer model changes as
> described below, and would like a slot to discuss the idea and solicit
> feedback/comments from the others there.
>
>
> This started with Arnd and I finally being in one place at the same
> time, and talking about how we want to evolve arm-soc maintainership
> moving forward. We've been independently thinking of ways to expand
> the group and making it more self-service for everybody, but there's a
> bunch of tooling needed to make it run smoothly beyond the smaller
> group we have now.
>
> In the end, we ended up looking at it from a slightly different angle:
> Right now, when contributors show up with new platform support, the
> first hill they need to climb is figuring out how they need to carve
> up their platform among all the various maintainers, how to make sure
> they're all handshaking on keeping things stable, and get code
> submitted. It's awkward, not well documented and one of the biggest
> overheads we have on our side as well.
>
> When we started talking to other maintainers, we're also realizing
> that we are currently duplicating a lot of work. In particular, we
> often all get cc:d on patch series, so we all need to read and filter,
> and assume that other maintainers spot the right patches, etc.
>
> We have discussed a few different options, and it seems like pooling
> more of the contribution flow to a group of co-maintainers is a useful
> approach. Initially, we're considering the arm-soc platforms, clock
> drivers and pinctrl drivers, which all tend to be affected by new
> platform contributions in this way, and often end up cross-cc:d on
> everything. Additionally, the flow for successfully merging a new
> platform or SoC needs to be documented and advertised. This is true
> whether or not we change the way that maintainers coordinate amongst
> themselves, or whether or not we change the current workflow used by
> platform contributors today.
>
> So, we're planning to change things up a bit. We're starting a new
> group that pools current arm-soc, clk and pinctrl drivers and
> maintainers into one funnel. We'll set up a new mail alias for the
> maintainer group, and one shared patchwork to collect contributions.
> We still expect developers to use existing mailing lists, and we still
> expect for example ARM platform maintainers to keep their workflow of
> collecting patches for their platform like they do today. Down the
> road it might make sense to incorporate other driver subsystems as
> well.
>
> Beyond this, we're going to keep a close eye on the drm-misc tree,
> which is exploring a move to gitlab (and working with gitlab on adding
> the features they need to move over). If they get a broad maintainer
> model working well in that environment it could be something we reuse
> for ourselves too.

gitlab is an umbrella term that covers many features proposed by the product.
Are there particular features that you already think you would be interested
in, or features that you already know you wouldn't want to use ?

> This group will also take on the responsibility of putting together
> the documentation and expected patch flow for new platform/SoC
> contributors. That documentation will need to evolve a bit over time
> as we try out this new collaboration between maintainers.
>
> To avoid an appearance of "ARM is taking over all architectures",
> we'll rename this to just the plain "SoC tree/group", and drop ARM
> from the name. As mentioned already initially we're anticipating
> covering ARM (32/64-bit like before) and RISC-V platform areas in a
> similar way. For other older/minor architectures that are
> semi-orphaned, we might pick up code as needed when it affects us,
> depending on maintainer status at the other end.
>
> We're doing the groundwork now, and will get trees/lists/patchworks
> setup for the next release cycle.
>
>
> People involved so far are:
>
> Olof Johansson (arm-soc)
> Arnd Bergmann (arm-soc)
> Kevin Hilman (arm-soc)
> Mike Turquette (clk)
> Stephen Boyd (clk)
> Linus Walleij (pinctrl + more)
> Mike Brown (gpio/regmap + more)
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Olof (on behalf of the group)

--
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart