Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@redhat.com>]

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, 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.

Regards,

Ric