Re: XFS leadership and a new co-maintainer candidate

[Ric Wheeler <ricwheeler@gmail.com>]

On 11/08/2013 02:34 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 12:03:37PM -0600, Ben Myers wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Doing this as an unilateral decisions is not something that will win you
> a fan base.
>
> While we never had anything reassembling a democracy in Linux Kernel
> development making decisions without even contacting the major
> contributor is wrong, twice so if the maintainer is a relatively minor
> contributor to start with.
>
> Just because it recent came up elsewhere I'd like to recite the
> definition from Trond here again:
>
> 	http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2012-discuss/2012-June/000066.html
>
> By many of the creative roles enlisted there it's clear that Dave should
> be the maintainer.  He's been the main contributor and chief architect
> for XFS for many year, while the maintainers came and went at the mercy
> of SGI.  This is not meant to bad mouth either of you as I think you're
> doing a reasonably good job compared to other maintainers, but at the
> same time the direction is set by other people that have a much longer
> involvement with the project, and having them officially in control
> would help us forward a lot.  It would also avoid having to spend
> considerable resources to train every new generation of SGI maintainer.
>
> Coming to and end I would like to maintain Dave Chinner as the primary
> XFS maintainer for all the work he has done as biggest contributor and
> architect of XFS since longer than I can remember, and I would love to
> retain Ben Myers as a co-maintainer for all the good work he has done
> maintaining and reviewing patches since November 2011.

This sounds like exactly the right thing to do to me as well,

Ric

>
> I would also like to use this post as a public venue to condemn the
> unilateral smokey backroom decisions about XFS maintainership that
> SGI is trying to enforce on the community.
>
>