[Buildroot] More maintainers

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com>]

Hello Avraham,

On Thu, 3 Sep 2020 18:44:27 +0300
Avraham Shukron <avraham.shukron@gmail.com> wrote:

> For what it's worth I think that the mail-based contribution process is
> part of the problem.
> With a decent Git server like GitHub/GitLab patches could be reviewed more
> easily.
> A CI pipeline could run tests that will give immediate feedback for any
> pull request.
> More importantly, it'll dramatically reduce the barrier for new and young
> contributors.

This has been discussed multiple times in the past in Buildroot, and in
other open-source projects. There is even as we speak some pretty
intense debate in the Linux kernel community about this.

As we've seen from the discussion here, the Buildroot issue is not a
lack of contribution, but a lack of review from trusted and experienced
reviewers, and a lack of maintainers time. So while I'm all for new
contributors and contributions, I don't think reducing the barrier is
really key here. Also, I've always been skeptical about this statement
that using Github reduces the barrier to entry. When you contribute to
a project, is really sending a patch over e-mail the difficult part
compared to understanding the code base, debugging the issue you've
found or implementing the feature you wanted ? Really installing "git
send-email" is a no-brainer straightforward process that is
ridiculously easy even compared writing any single change in the code
base with a decent commit message. Aren't we using this "reducing the
barrier" argument a bit inappropriately here ?

I believe I can say that all four Buildroot maintainers have a very
strong preference for and a very optimized workflow to work with e-mail
based patch submission and review.

Somewhat related, recently a patch series I submitted last year to
OpenWrt (which wasn't merged) got picked up by someone else, and
re-submitted with new updates and fixes. Due to being the original
author, I was in copy of all the Github discussion that took place. And
I found it absolutely impossible and awful to follow the different
revisions of the patch series, to which version of the patch series the
comments were being made, etc.

Perhaps for some people the Github pull request workflow makes sense,
but I believe it's important to recognize and realize that there are
also people for which this workflow doesn't make sense.

> Buildroot is all about using simple and familiar tools like make and
> Kconfig, and I personally think that this principle should also be applied
> to the contribution process and right now buildroot is one of the last
> active open source projects using the mailing list approach.

This is a very biased statement: there are still plenty of open-source
projects that use e-mail based contribution workflow. I don't think we
can call Linux or U-Boot "inactive" projects. Can we? :-)

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com