* [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout @ 2023-08-16 18:08 Josef Bacik 2023-08-16 20:14 ` Luis Chamberlain 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Steven Rostedt 0 siblings, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Josef Bacik @ 2023-08-16 18:08 UTC (permalink / raw) To: ksummit Hello, This is a topic we're beating to death but haven't really made decent progress on WRT real solutions. I know I have advocated for adding even more responsibilties to maintainers plates, which isn't really helpful. There is a lot in this email, so I suppose choose your own adventure when it comes to what we think is relevant to discuss. Maintainers/long time developers are burning out. At the same time there's frustration from new comers who have trouble getting their patches accepted. We have instances of arguments between longtime developers which leads to more frustration because it drags on the development process. I have argued for the last few years that maintainers should be taking a more active role in the social side of our development process. Be the grownups in the room and help mitigate these conflicts before they sour relationships. But this just adds to the long list of things that maintainers already need to do. Oftentimes they are the only reviewers, testers, and main developers rolled into one. We have an increase of automated testing, which while is a net positive, adds to the stress of maintainers who view these reports as their personal responsibilty to address. We all work differently, so having big sweeping solutions is a non-starter. However I think there are things we can learn from eachother to encourage different thinking and thus result in a smoother development experience for all of us. Patch review: Obviously more people the better, encouraging review by trading reviews for having developers patches reviewed is a good method, but this only works for sufficiently large communities. Automated testing: This doesn't replace review, but it can help add confidence when you're accepting patch reviews from less experienced members. De-prioritize automated reports: Syzbot is great, but the failure cases can be sporadic and difficult to reproduce. Things that are bisected to a specific patch are obviously easy to tackle, but don't let yourself get overwhelmed by syzbot, they're good things to hand to new developers to cut their teeth on. Maintainer groups, not sole maintainers: We all have things going on, build up people you trust and develop a way to spread the maintenance load. Automate everything: I hate email, that is no secret, but even with email we can automate a lot of things. The btrfs team built out the GH CI so developers can drive their own testing, spreading the load. Eventually I hope to get to the point where the merging of patches is automated away so we don't have to deal with those mechanics. Developing strategies to handle the more mundane tasks of managing our projects will help free us to engage better with our communities, and guide people to be better developers, feeding back into the ecosystem that will help reduce the pain. Thanks, Josef ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-16 18:08 [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout Josef Bacik @ 2023-08-16 20:14 ` Luis Chamberlain 2023-08-17 9:39 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 12:00 ` Jani Nikula 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Steven Rostedt 1 sibling, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Luis Chamberlain @ 2023-08-16 20:14 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josef Bacik; +Cc: ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 02:08:08PM -0400, Josef Bacik wrote: > Maintainers/long time developers are burning out. At the same time there's > frustration from new comers who have trouble getting their patches accepted. We > have instances of arguments between longtime developers which leads to more > frustration because it drags on the development process. <-- snip --> > Automate everything: I hate email, that is no secret, but even with email we can > automate a lot of things. The btrfs team built out the GH CI so developers can > drive their own testing, spreading the load. Eventually I hope to get to the > point where the merging of patches is automated away so we don't have to deal > with those mechanics. > > Developing strategies to handle the more mundane tasks of managing our projects > will help free us to engage better with our communities, and guide people to be > better developers, feeding back into the ecosystem that will help reduce the > pain. Thanks, I have been thinking about *many* of these things *for years*, but also *doing*. In the *doing* part at the last LSFMM this year I described challenges I have faced in this *doing*, but I think it is useful to itemize a few of them so they are reminders: a) hardware resources b) push button people / reporting / etc Today a) is resolved typically by either companies interested and keeping things private (legal or whatnot) or sharing hardware resources with community members (Samsung has let me share a big baremetal server for community testing), and lately we also now have Oracle offering OCI instances. I have *yet* to hear back from any other cloud provider. The economic downturn makes a) harder today, whereas a few years before I was hinted this was *not* a problem. And so we must take anything we can get for it. Jeff Layton has also hinted that developers tend prefer for resources to be independent of just one company, ie, we can't just have one sole provider. I believe this is the right approach. Loosing my test rig after I switched an employer once made upkeeping XFS stable backporting work just not possible long ago and, fortunately, today we have a team of good folks with hw resources from 3 different companies to succeed. This wasn't planned. It just happened. So to help with automation to help with the burnout, there is a "meta" aspect of a) then: proactive planning to get enough public resources for community developers to step up to help, whether that be to backport / test stable fixes, or resources for future automation of tests. If your subsystem is not ready to discuss a) yet, that likely might be because different companies / folks use different things to test subsystems / regressions / new patches. And there in lies another "meta" issue. In the *worst* case there are simply no tests, *or* maintainers suggesting there is no way to automate *cough*. There are also those that believe testing is super awesome, but seem to shy away from the idea that our community is not ready for *requiring* tests for kernel development / new patches / features / etc. IMHO evidence of burnouts is a strong suggestion we should *strive* for it. The issue is that typically this last part is an afterthought in the worst case, and even with best intentions, can sometimes be a resource constrain whether that be physical hardware or the b) part mentioned above. What does this tell us, if we care about this? *If* automation is to be a serious consideration it *must* be just as good as the kernel code we write. And so I think it would help for those that *do* care about this to start thinking about all these things proactively in this sense. As for b) feedback from LSFMM was let's just automate it too. While sensible, without resource consideration its a slow steep slope. But I think we're getting better at that with time. Not only do we need to think about writing test coverage but also the other parts of b). In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even worth reviewing. There are some other R&D type of ideas out there I have shared with some peers and some have shared with me too, which could probably help long term too, but one step at a time. To help with b) my goal was to leverage and learn what eBPF folks have done, allow kdevops to use it, and then start integrating with patchwork for either the stuff I maintain or for the subsystems that are interested in leverating the automation framework behind kdevops. A boring but perhaps fitting way to think about what we do is to start thinking about what we do with kernel development as a public utlity and service and we just need to automate testing of this public utility. I'd be very interested in talking about this if invited but my current flight departs in the afternoon, but I could perhaps see to fly the next day if this topic is chosen / I get an invite. Luis ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-16 20:14 ` Luis Chamberlain @ 2023-08-17 9:39 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 12:36 ` Andrew Lunn 2023-08-17 12:00 ` Jani Nikula 1 sibling, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-17 9:39 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Luis Chamberlain; +Cc: Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 01:14:46PM -0700, Luis Chamberlain wrote: > On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 02:08:08PM -0400, Josef Bacik wrote: > > Maintainers/long time developers are burning out. At the same time there's > > frustration from new comers who have trouble getting their patches accepted. We > > have instances of arguments between longtime developers which leads to more > > frustration because it drags on the development process. > > <-- snip --> > > > Automate everything: I hate email, that is no secret, but even with email we can > > automate a lot of things. The btrfs team built out the GH CI so developers can > > drive their own testing, spreading the load. Eventually I hope to get to the > > point where the merging of patches is automated away so we don't have to deal > > with those mechanics. > > > > Developing strategies to handle the more mundane tasks of managing our projects > > will help free us to engage better with our communities, and guide people to be > > better developers, feeding back into the ecosystem that will help reduce the > > pain. Thanks, > > I have been thinking about *many* of these things *for years*, but also *doing*. > > In the *doing* part at the last LSFMM this year I described challenges I have > faced in this *doing*, but I think it is useful to itemize a few of them > so they are reminders: > > a) hardware resources > b) push button people / reporting / etc > > Today a) is resolved typically by either companies interested and > keeping things private (legal or whatnot) or sharing hardware resources > with community members (Samsung has let me share a big baremetal server > for community testing), and lately we also now have Oracle offering OCI > instances. I have *yet* to hear back from any other cloud provider. > > The economic downturn makes a) harder today, whereas a few years before > I was hinted this was *not* a problem. And so we must take anything we > can get for it. > > Jeff Layton has also hinted that developers tend prefer for resources to > be independent of just one company, ie, we can't just have one sole > provider. I believe this is the right approach. Loosing my test rig > after I switched an employer once made upkeeping XFS stable backporting > work just not possible long ago and, fortunately, today we have a team of > good folks with hw resources from 3 different companies to succeed. This > wasn't planned. It just happened. > > So to help with automation to help with the burnout, there is a "meta" > aspect of a) then: proactive planning to get enough public resources for > community developers to step up to help, whether that be to backport / > test stable fixes, or resources for future automation of tests. > > If your subsystem is not ready to discuss a) yet, that likely might be > because different companies / folks use different things to test subsystems / > regressions / new patches. And there in lies another "meta" issue. > > In the *worst* case there are simply no tests, *or* maintainers suggesting > there is no way to automate *cough*. > > There are also those that believe testing is super awesome, but seem to > shy away from the idea that our community is not ready for *requiring* > tests for kernel development / new patches / features / etc. IMHO evidence > of burnouts is a strong suggestion we should *strive* for it. The issue > is that typically this last part is an afterthought in the worst case, > and even with best intentions, can sometimes be a resource constrain > whether that be physical hardware or the b) part mentioned above. > > What does this tell us, if we care about this? *If* automation is to be > a serious consideration it *must* be just as good as the kernel code we > write. And so I think it would help for those that *do* care about this > to start thinking about all these things proactively in this sense. > > As for b) feedback from LSFMM was let's just automate it too. While > sensible, without resource consideration its a slow steep slope. But > I think we're getting better at that with time. Not only do we need > to think about writing test coverage but also the other parts of b). > > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even > worth reviewing. This is interesting, do you have any link to share to related resources ? > There are some other R&D type of ideas out there I have shared with some > peers and some have shared with me too, which could probably help long > term too, but one step at a time. > > To help with b) my goal was to leverage and learn what eBPF folks have > done, allow kdevops to use it, and then start integrating with patchwork > for either the stuff I maintain or for the subsystems that are > interested in leverating the automation framework behind kdevops. > > A boring but perhaps fitting way to think about what we do is to start > thinking about what we do with kernel development as a public utlity and > service and we just need to automate testing of this public utility. > > I'd be very interested in talking about this if invited but my current > flight departs in the afternoon, but I could perhaps see to fly the next day if > this topic is chosen / I get an invite. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 9:39 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-17 12:36 ` Andrew Lunn 2023-08-17 15:19 ` Jakub Kicinski 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Andrew Lunn @ 2023-08-17 12:36 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu, Jakub Kicinski > > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement > > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then > > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. > > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* > > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even > > worth reviewing. > > This is interesting, do you have any link to share to related resources > ? I'm guessing, but i think that is referring to the "Checks" section in a patchworks status page. Picking a couple of patches at random: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20230816210049.54733-9-saeed@kernel.org/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20230816210049.54733-2-saeed@kernel.org/ Jakub can tell you more. Andrew ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 12:36 ` Andrew Lunn @ 2023-08-17 15:19 ` Jakub Kicinski 2023-08-17 23:54 ` Alexei Starovoitov 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Jakub Kicinski @ 2023-08-17 15:19 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Andrew Lunn Cc: Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Thu, 17 Aug 2023 14:36:31 +0200 Andrew Lunn wrote: > > > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement > > > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then > > > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. > > > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* > > > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even > > > worth reviewing. > > > > This is interesting, do you have any link to share to related resources > > ? > > I'm guessing, but i think that is referring to the "Checks" section in > a patchworks status page. Picking a couple of patches at random: > > https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20230816210049.54733-9-saeed@kernel.org/ > > https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20230816210049.54733-2-saeed@kernel.org/ > > Jakub can tell you more. FWIW BPF runs more stuff, they spin up VMs and run the actual selftests, so looking at a BPF patch will be more informative: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20230816045959.358059-3-houtao@huaweicloud.com/ Exact details are to my knowledge in flux, the system is constantly being improved. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 15:19 ` Jakub Kicinski @ 2023-08-17 23:54 ` Alexei Starovoitov 2023-08-18 13:55 ` Linus Walleij 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Alexei Starovoitov @ 2023-08-17 23:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jakub Kicinski Cc: Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 8:20 AM Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote: > > On Thu, 17 Aug 2023 14:36:31 +0200 Andrew Lunn wrote: > > > > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement > > > > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then > > > > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. > > > > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* > > > > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even > > > > worth reviewing. > > > > > > This is interesting, do you have any link to share to related resources > > > ? > > > > I'm guessing, but i think that is referring to the "Checks" section in > > a patchworks status page. Picking a couple of patches at random: > > > > https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20230816210049.54733-9-saeed@kernel.org/ > > > > https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20230816210049.54733-2-saeed@kernel.org/ > > > > Jakub can tell you more. > > FWIW BPF runs more stuff, they spin up VMs and run the actual selftests, > so looking at a BPF patch will be more informative: > > https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20230816045959.358059-3-houtao@huaweicloud.com/ > > Exact details are to my knowledge in flux, the system is constantly > being improved. Thanks for raising awareness of BPF CI. I have to highlight that maintaining BPF CI is a full time job on its own. We have engineers oncall who monitor failures in CI itself (not failures in bpf selftests caused by new patches). CI automation breaks often. Packages missing, VMs too slow, etc. The link above is an example where bpf test_maps fails on s390 and passes on arm64 and x86. We've been trying to root cause it for a long time. So far it looks to be an odd CPU virtualization artifact on that particular architecture. There is a long list of CI features that we're working on. CI framework is open sourced, of course. I'd like to bring the thread back to Josef's point: > This thread has sort of wandered off into the "how to do automation" weeds. > I think that automation is a good solution for a subset of the problems that > maintainers face, but it's not my main focus. BPF has solid CI that helps a lot, but the maintainer burnout is acutely felt. The main reason for burnout is patch flood. The maintainer's day looks like non-stop code review. The patch backlog just doesn't end. We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well via positive/negative scores: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/ It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews. Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that reviewing other patches will help them land their own. To address maintainer burnout we need to change the culture of the community and transform active developers to active code reviewers. We're looking for ideas on how to do that. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 23:54 ` Alexei Starovoitov @ 2023-08-18 13:55 ` Linus Walleij 2023-08-18 15:09 ` Jakub Kicinski 2023-08-18 15:26 ` Laurent Pinchart 0 siblings, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Linus Walleij @ 2023-08-18 13:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Alexei Starovoitov Cc: Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu Alexei, thanks for returning the conversation to this very important topic. On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 1:55 AM Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com> wrote: > BPF has solid CI that helps a lot, but the maintainer burnout is acutely felt. > The main reason for burnout is patch flood. I agree this is an important cause. Even worse is any kind of social conflict or bad mood in the community. Science has studied stress, what we mostly run into is called "microstress". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_stress > The maintainer's day looks like non-stop code review. > The patch backlog just doesn't end. I've been there too :( > We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well > via positive/negative scores: > https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/ > > It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume > that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews. > Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that > reviewing other patches will help them land their own. The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little bit. Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you will review and also merge their stuff in return. Sometimes this works. Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full time on similar things, yay! So much support. When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well. Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to review and you feel like begging. So different solutions for different contributors may be needed. > To address maintainer burnout we need to change the culture of the community > and transform active developers to active code reviewers. > We're looking for ideas on how to do that. I agree. To deal with the symptoms (feeling stressed) when it gets too much for me personally I have different coping mechanisms. The basic idea is to do stuff that generate the opposite of stress. This could be outside of work, but also working on stuff in the kernel that gives a feeling of immediate accomplishment and closure is good. Such as maintaining some drivers and systems that are old, so nobody is begging you to fix it now now now. Paying of some old techical debt. That's nice. Drilling into a specific bug that is not urgent can also be very de-stressing, it's hard work but nobody is dependent on you fixing it now. You don't even need to come up with a solution. Yours, Linus Walleij ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 13:55 ` Linus Walleij @ 2023-08-18 15:09 ` Jakub Kicinski 2023-08-18 17:07 ` Linus Torvalds 2023-08-18 15:26 ` Laurent Pinchart 1 sibling, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Jakub Kicinski @ 2023-08-18 15:09 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Linus Walleij Cc: Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 15:55:11 +0200 Linus Walleij wrote: > > We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well > > via positive/negative scores: > > https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/ > > > > It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume > > that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews. > > Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that > > reviewing other patches will help them land their own. > > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little > bit. > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you > will review and also merge their stuff in return. > Sometimes this works. > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full > time on similar things, yay! So much support. > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well. > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to > review and you feel like begging. > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed. I keep bringing this up at the TAB meetings and after the last maintainer summit to Linus and Ted but I feel like information sharing and community building across subsystem is missing. I was wondering last time if we can do a run of short sessions where a few volunteers talk about their subsystems? Let's say 10min talking about - current process subsystem uses - "realities" / day to day challenges / problems - how the subsystem is evolving the process We keep trying various things in our neck of the woods, I'm can talk about net, anyone else thinks this would be useful and wants to volunteer? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 15:09 ` Jakub Kicinski @ 2023-08-18 17:07 ` Linus Torvalds 2023-08-19 6:45 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-21 8:50 ` Daniel Vetter 0 siblings, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Linus Torvalds @ 2023-08-18 17:07 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jakub Kicinski Cc: Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 17:10, Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote: > > I was wondering last time if we can do a run of short sessions > where a few volunteers talk about their subsystems? Let's say > 10min talking about > - current process subsystem uses > - "realities" / day to day challenges / problems > - how the subsystem is evolving the process I feel like we did exactly that a few years in a row, but it was probably back before covid times, and probably when it was still called the "kernel summit" rather than "maintainer summit". At that point it was mainly just the GPU and ARM people who were doing it. [ Goes back and looks at my old ksummit mails ] Heh. It seems we did it enough that during the 2018 discussion, we had Daniel Vetter say "We don't need another overview over group maintainership". I think most of this was 2016/17 or so, and then by 2018 we had that "not again.." situation. But I suspect that all predates the networking people starting to do the group maintainership (I think you started doing pull requests in 2020?), so I guess you never saw any of that. I do think the whole "how to spread the pain of being a maintainer" is very much the point of the maintainer summit, though, so I do think we should revisit. Linus ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 17:07 ` Linus Torvalds @ 2023-08-19 6:45 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-21 15:35 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum 2023-08-21 8:50 ` Daniel Vetter 1 sibling, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Leon Romanovsky @ 2023-08-19 6:45 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 07:07:24PM +0200, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 17:10, Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote: > > > > I was wondering last time if we can do a run of short sessions > > where a few volunteers talk about their subsystems? Let's say > > 10min talking about > > - current process subsystem uses > > - "realities" / day to day challenges / problems > > - how the subsystem is evolving the process > > I feel like we did exactly that a few years in a row, but it was > probably back before covid times, and probably when it was still > called the "kernel summit" rather than "maintainer summit". <...> > I do think the whole "how to spread the pain of being a maintainer" is > very much the point of the maintainer summit, though, so I do think we > should revisit. It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their upstream work. From what I personally saw, the reasons can be different from truly no time upto toxic subsystem behavior with huge variety and gray areas in between. It is not clear to me how to get honest answers without fear of loosing an ability to work with that subsystems later. Thanks > > Linus > ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-19 6:45 ` Leon Romanovsky @ 2023-08-21 15:35 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-22 7:41 ` Jiri Kosina 2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum 1 sibling, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-21 15:35 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Leon Romanovsky Cc: Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 09:45:37AM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 07:07:24PM +0200, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 17:10, Jakub Kicinski wrote: > > > > > > I was wondering last time if we can do a run of short sessions > > > where a few volunteers talk about their subsystems? Let's say > > > 10min talking about > > > - current process subsystem uses > > > - "realities" / day to day challenges / problems > > > - how the subsystem is evolving the process > > > > I feel like we did exactly that a few years in a row, but it was > > probably back before covid times, and probably when it was still > > called the "kernel summit" rather than "maintainer summit". > > <...> > > > I do think the whole "how to spread the pain of being a maintainer" is > > very much the point of the maintainer summit, though, so I do think we > > should revisit. > > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. > > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their > upstream work. > > From what I personally saw, the reasons can be different from truly > no time upto toxic subsystem behavior with huge variety and gray areas > in between. That can be the case, but I think that the "no time" excuse is not just an excuse. Many developers working upstream, even (or perhaps especially ?) those working for large companies, are put under intense time pressure by their management. If we want to consider the "no time" reason as an excuse, we should see it as a management excuse, not an individual contributor excuse. > It is not clear to me how to get honest answers without fear of loosing > an ability to work with that subsystems later. One straightforward (on paper) option is to guarantee anonymity. When I was in university, students were given the opportunity to provide feedback on teachers, and the feedback was aggregated into a report that didn't contain any personal information that could be used to identify the students. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-21 15:35 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-22 7:41 ` Jiri Kosina 2023-08-22 9:05 ` Hannes Reinecke 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Jiri Kosina @ 2023-08-22 7:41 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > It is not clear to me how to get honest answers without fear of > > loosing an ability to work with that subsystems later. > > One straightforward (on paper) option is to guarantee anonymity. When I > was in university, students were given the opportunity to provide > feedback on teachers, and the feedback was aggregated into a report that > didn't contain any personal information that could be used to identify > the students. I understand where you are coming from with this (my university did the same :) ), but in my view this has a huge potential for not really reflecting reality. Rationale being: the people who e.g. got their code rejected will naturally tend to provide negative feedback, even if rejecting the code was objectively the right thing to do. And vice versa. Thanks, -- Jiri Kosina SUSE Labs ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 7:41 ` Jiri Kosina @ 2023-08-22 9:05 ` Hannes Reinecke 2023-08-22 10:13 ` Leon Romanovsky 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Hannes Reinecke @ 2023-08-22 9:05 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jiri Kosina, Laurent Pinchart Cc: Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On 8/22/23 09:41, Jiri Kosina wrote: > On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > >>> It is not clear to me how to get honest answers without fear of >>> loosing an ability to work with that subsystems later. >> >> One straightforward (on paper) option is to guarantee anonymity. When I >> was in university, students were given the opportunity to provide >> feedback on teachers, and the feedback was aggregated into a report that >> didn't contain any personal information that could be used to identify >> the students. > > I understand where you are coming from with this (my university did the > same :) ), but in my view this has a huge potential for not really > reflecting reality. Rationale being: the people who e.g. got their code > rejected will naturally tend to provide negative feedback, even if > rejecting the code was objectively the right thing to do. > > And vice versa. > I do see the advantage, but the main disadvantage here is that it's eroding trust between people. Anonymous review tends to be used for negative feedback, and I am aware that negative feedback to maintainers can have a direct impact on your ability to work in that subsystem (and believe me, I have been in that position. Several times.) But in the end if you want to continue to work in that subsystem you have to come to some sort of arrangement here. I do believe that our maintainers are capable of differentiating between personal and technical issues, so it should be possible to work together despite personal ... (issues? differences?). But none of the above will work if the feedback is anonymously. Maintainer will have a reason for reacting that way, and won't be able to explain themselves properly if they don't know whom to address. Cheers, Hannes -- Dr. Hannes Reinecke Kernel Storage Architect hare@suse.de +49 911 74053 688 SUSE Software Solutions GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg HRB 36809 (AG Nürnberg), Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 9:05 ` Hannes Reinecke @ 2023-08-22 10:13 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-22 11:25 ` Laurent Pinchart 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Leon Romanovsky @ 2023-08-22 10:13 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Hannes Reinecke Cc: Jiri Kosina, Laurent Pinchart, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 11:05:32AM +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote: > On 8/22/23 09:41, Jiri Kosina wrote: > > On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > > > > > It is not clear to me how to get honest answers without fear of > > > > loosing an ability to work with that subsystems later. > > > > > > One straightforward (on paper) option is to guarantee anonymity. When I > > > was in university, students were given the opportunity to provide > > > feedback on teachers, and the feedback was aggregated into a report that > > > didn't contain any personal information that could be used to identify > > > the students. > > > > I understand where you are coming from with this (my university did the > > same :) ), but in my view this has a huge potential for not really > > reflecting reality. Rationale being: the people who e.g. got their code > > rejected will naturally tend to provide negative feedback, even if > > rejecting the code was objectively the right thing to do. > > > > And vice versa. > > > I do see the advantage, but the main disadvantage here is that it's eroding > trust between people. Anonymous review tends to be used for > negative feedback, and I am aware that negative feedback to maintainers > can have a direct impact on your ability to work in that subsystem > (and believe me, I have been in that position. Several times.) > But in the end if you want to continue to work in that subsystem > you have to come to some sort of arrangement here. > I do believe that our maintainers are capable of differentiating > between personal and technical issues, so it should be possible > to work together despite personal ... (issues? differences?). > > But none of the above will work if the feedback is anonymously. > Maintainer will have a reason for reacting that way, and won't > be able to explain themselves properly if they don't know whom > to address. I don't think that it is possible to provide feedback purely anonymously, as subsystems has pretty stable number of contributors and the feedback that they will provide will allow identify them relatively easy by savvy maintainer. Thanks > > Cheers, > > Hannes > -- > Dr. Hannes Reinecke Kernel Storage Architect > hare@suse.de +49 911 74053 688 > SUSE Software Solutions GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg > HRB 36809 (AG Nürnberg), Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew > Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman > ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 10:13 ` Leon Romanovsky @ 2023-08-22 11:25 ` Laurent Pinchart 0 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-22 11:25 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Leon Romanovsky Cc: Hannes Reinecke, Jiri Kosina, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 01:13:11PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 11:05:32AM +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote: > > On 8/22/23 09:41, Jiri Kosina wrote: > > > On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > > > > > > > It is not clear to me how to get honest answers without fear of > > > > > loosing an ability to work with that subsystems later. > > > > > > > > One straightforward (on paper) option is to guarantee anonymity. When I > > > > was in university, students were given the opportunity to provide > > > > feedback on teachers, and the feedback was aggregated into a report that > > > > didn't contain any personal information that could be used to identify > > > > the students. > > > > > > I understand where you are coming from with this (my university did the > > > same :) ), but in my view this has a huge potential for not really > > > reflecting reality. Rationale being: the people who e.g. got their code > > > rejected will naturally tend to provide negative feedback, even if > > > rejecting the code was objectively the right thing to do. > > > > > > And vice versa. > > > > > I do see the advantage, but the main disadvantage here is that it's eroding > > trust between people. Anonymous review tends to be used for > > negative feedback, and I am aware that negative feedback to maintainers > > can have a direct impact on your ability to work in that subsystem > > (and believe me, I have been in that position. Several times.) > > But in the end if you want to continue to work in that subsystem > > you have to come to some sort of arrangement here. > > I do believe that our maintainers are capable of differentiating > > between personal and technical issues, so it should be possible > > to work together despite personal ... (issues? differences?). > > > > But none of the above will work if the feedback is anonymously. > > Maintainer will have a reason for reacting that way, and won't > > be able to explain themselves properly if they don't know whom > > to address. > > I don't think that it is possible to provide feedback purely > anonymously, as subsystems has pretty stable number of contributors > and the feedback that they will provide will allow identify them > relatively easy by savvy maintainer. Usually, feedback is anonymized by gathering information from multiple sources, and compiling it in a way that underlines the main points instead of focussing on particular personal stories. The process can also filter out non-constructive feedback. For instance, if multiple replies to the survey mention a very large time to get patches reviewed, that's something that can be part of an anonymized report. This however requires a large enough pool of developers to submit feedback, so it may not work well in some cases. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-19 6:45 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-21 15:35 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum 2023-08-22 4:07 ` Dave Airlie ` (3 more replies) 1 sibling, 4 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Vegard Nossum @ 2023-08-21 19:23 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds Cc: Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On 8/19/23 08:45, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. > > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their > upstream work. Hi, For some drive-by or would-be reviewers, at least, I think part of the problem is perverse or misaligned incentives. If you write code and your patches are accepted in the kernel, it counts towards your commit count, which is a metric that people look at, for better or worse (probably worse). When you review a patch and you find some problem with it, the patch will NOT get accepted in the kernel (at least not in that form), and your name will NOT appear in the git log. So in a way, in order for your contribution to get recorded, you have to give the patch a passing grade -OR- you are now on the hook to keep reviewing every following iteration of the patch until it's in a state where you're completely sure it doesn't have any problems. (Of course, if you just rubber-stamp your Reviewed-by: on everything then you are bound to be found out sooner or later -- or at the very least seen as an unreliable reviewer.) But let's assume you don't give out your Reviewed-by: without having REALLY checked the patch thoroughly. Even then, mistakes can slip in. In a way, being a reviewer and missing something critical is even worse than being the author and missing something critical. Is it even worth putting your Reviewed-by: on something if you're not 100% sure this patch is not going to cause an issue? Are people going to trust you in the future if you make a mistake in your review? Let's say you're completely sure you found an issue with the patch. Why not just stay silent, hope that nobody catches it, and then submit your own patch later to fix it? That will get your name in the log. Even worse, if it's a security issue you can maybe write an exploit for it and either get a bounty from Google or sell it for serious $$$ to various malicious actors. [Note that I'm not saying most people would do this; I don't know. I am just using it as an example to show that the incentives are disproportionate.] The incentives that remain (as far as I can tell) are: 1) you get familiar with a specific part of the kernel, and 2) you get goodwill and recognition from other kernel developers. Both assume a certain volume of reviews to pay off in any significant way. Even then, depending on your ultimate goals, doing reviews is typically a low-ROI activity for individuals compared to things like actually writing code and submitting patches. If the community truly values reviews, then I think it's necessary to find better mechanisms for recognizing and rewarding reviews. Can we maybe adjust the standards of the Reviewed-by: tag to mean that the person has looked at the patch (or an earlier version of it) and provided comments that show they actually put some effort into it? For example, if a patch is changing a function (as patches often do), the reviewer should add a line saying "error paths in foo() lgtm" and not just tack on their Reviewed-by: line. This adjustment would make it harder to just slap a Reviewed-by: on a patch, but it would also make it easier to get your name in the changelog provided that you actually put the effort in. Maybe release notes/shortlogs could also include reviewer stats as a bonus. I'm aware of the regular LWN articles covering reviewer stats, but again, I think that only includes reviews for patches that actually passed the review and made it into the kernel. I suspect that review duty often falls on maintainers because they know their own subsystem the best (and maybe also because they are the reviewer of last resort). I think that reviews are a great way to learn more about a subsystem and we should encourage newcomers and non-experts to contribute their reviews (and get credit for it) even if those reviews are not as complete as a maintainer's or subsystem expert's review would be. And we can encourage that by nudging the incentives in the right direction. Vegard ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum @ 2023-08-22 4:07 ` Dave Airlie 2023-08-22 9:46 ` Jan Kara ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Dave Airlie @ 2023-08-22 4:07 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Vegard Nossum Cc: Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue, 22 Aug 2023 at 05:24, Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com> wrote: > > > On 8/19/23 08:45, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors > > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. > > > > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we > > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. > > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their > > upstream work. > > Hi, > > For some drive-by or would-be reviewers, at least, I think part of the > problem is perverse or misaligned incentives. > > If you write code and your patches are accepted in the kernel, it counts > towards your commit count, which is a metric that people look at, for > better or worse (probably worse). You have to create some sort of market I suppose, where people have to work in a community to get their own patches reviewed by other people who aren't incentivised by their management to review patches. I don't think there's a nice way to do it, anyone wanting patches merged needs to review patches from others, and vice-versa, it's good if you have multiple submissions of the same sort of driver features at the same time which happens often, then they cross work. The whole "hardware I don't have" thing is a misnomer, nobody expects you or reviewers to know how to program the hardware, but they do expect you to understand how to interface a driver to the kernel, know what good code patterns to use and when a new submission does something completely unexpected then senior maintainers need to get involved to push back. Dave. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum 2023-08-22 4:07 ` Dave Airlie @ 2023-08-22 9:46 ` Jan Kara 2023-08-22 10:10 ` Christian Brauner 2023-08-22 11:05 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-29 12:54 ` Steven Rostedt 2023-09-13 9:02 ` Dan Carpenter 3 siblings, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Jan Kara @ 2023-08-22 9:46 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Vegard Nossum Cc: Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Mon 21-08-23 21:23:18, Vegard Nossum wrote: > On 8/19/23 08:45, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors > > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. > > > > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we > > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. > > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their > > upstream work. > > For some drive-by or would-be reviewers, at least, I think part of the > problem is perverse or misaligned incentives. > > If you write code and your patches are accepted in the kernel, it counts > towards your commit count, which is a metric that people look at, for > better or worse (probably worse). > > When you review a patch and you find some problem with it, the patch > will NOT get accepted in the kernel (at least not in that form), and > your name will NOT appear in the git log. So in a way, in order for > your contribution to get recorded, you have to give the patch a > passing grade -OR- you are now on the hook to keep reviewing every > following iteration of the patch until it's in a state where you're > completely sure it doesn't have any problems. > > (Of course, if you just rubber-stamp your Reviewed-by: on everything > then you are bound to be found out sooner or later -- or at the very > least seen as an unreliable reviewer.) > > But let's assume you don't give out your Reviewed-by: without having > REALLY checked the patch thoroughly. Even then, mistakes can slip in. > In a way, being a reviewer and missing something critical is even > worse than being the author and missing something critical. Is it even > worth putting your Reviewed-by: on something if you're not 100% sure > this patch is not going to cause an issue? Are people going to trust > you in the future if you make a mistake in your review? > > Let's say you're completely sure you found an issue with the patch. Why > not just stay silent, hope that nobody catches it, and then submit your > own patch later to fix it? That will get your name in the log. Even > worse, if it's a security issue you can maybe write an exploit for it > and either get a bounty from Google or sell it for serious $$$ to > various malicious actors. [Note that I'm not saying most people would do > this; I don't know. I am just using it as an example to show that the > incentives are disproportionate.] > > The incentives that remain (as far as I can tell) are: > > 1) you get familiar with a specific part of the kernel, and > 2) you get goodwill and recognition from other kernel developers. I agree it is good to create positive incentives to provide good review. But I believe what really makes people do good reviews is the sense of common responsibility - you don't want buggy or misdesigned stuff to get into the subsystem you work with because that's going to make life harder for everybody including you in the future. And I understand the "tragedy of commons" (IOW selfishness) works against this so incentives or review-trading or other methods can help but ultimately it is IMHO about making people understand and accept this shared responsibility... Honza -- Jan Kara <jack@suse.com> SUSE Labs, CR ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 9:46 ` Jan Kara @ 2023-08-22 10:10 ` Christian Brauner 2023-08-22 10:20 ` Jan Kara 2023-08-22 11:29 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-22 11:05 ` Leon Romanovsky 1 sibling, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Christian Brauner @ 2023-08-22 10:10 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jan Kara Cc: Vegard Nossum, Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu > I agree it is good to create positive incentives to provide good review. > But I believe what really makes people do good reviews is the sense of > common responsibility - you don't want buggy or misdesigned stuff to get > into the subsystem you work with because that's going to make life harder > for everybody including you in the future. And I understand the "tragedy of Yes, this is a Herculean task and often just results in complaints that this is unnecessary non-technical pushback. > commons" (IOW selfishness) works against this so incentives or > review-trading or other methods can help but ultimately it is IMHO about > making people understand and accept this shared responsibility... Yes, but in order to encourage and incentivize shared responsibility the environment must feel sufficiently safe and have a good model of shared ownership. I think we often still have deficits in both (with differences between subsystems). ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 10:10 ` Christian Brauner @ 2023-08-22 10:20 ` Jan Kara 2023-08-22 11:29 ` Laurent Pinchart 1 sibling, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Jan Kara @ 2023-08-22 10:20 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Christian Brauner Cc: Jan Kara, Vegard Nossum, Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue 22-08-23 12:10:26, Christian Brauner wrote: > > I agree it is good to create positive incentives to provide good review. > > But I believe what really makes people do good reviews is the sense of > > common responsibility - you don't want buggy or misdesigned stuff to get > > into the subsystem you work with because that's going to make life harder > > for everybody including you in the future. And I understand the "tragedy of > > Yes, this is a Herculean task and often just results in complaints that > this is unnecessary non-technical pushback. > > > commons" (IOW selfishness) works against this so incentives or > > review-trading or other methods can help but ultimately it is IMHO about > > making people understand and accept this shared responsibility... > > Yes, but in order to encourage and incentivize shared responsibility the > environment must feel sufficiently safe and have a good model of shared > ownership. I think we often still have deficits in both (with > differences between subsystems). We are in full agreement here :). Honza -- Jan Kara <jack@suse.com> SUSE Labs, CR ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 10:10 ` Christian Brauner 2023-08-22 10:20 ` Jan Kara @ 2023-08-22 11:29 ` Laurent Pinchart 1 sibling, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-22 11:29 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Christian Brauner Cc: Jan Kara, Vegard Nossum, Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 12:10:26PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote: > > I agree it is good to create positive incentives to provide good review. > > But I believe what really makes people do good reviews is the sense of > > common responsibility - you don't want buggy or misdesigned stuff to get > > into the subsystem you work with because that's going to make life harder > > for everybody including you in the future. And I understand the "tragedy of > > Yes, this is a Herculean task and often just results in complaints that > this is unnecessary non-technical pushback. > > > commons" (IOW selfishness) works against this so incentives or > > review-trading or other methods can help but ultimately it is IMHO about > > making people understand and accept this shared responsibility... > > Yes, but in order to encourage and incentivize shared responsibility the > environment must feel sufficiently safe and have a good model of shared > ownership. I think we often still have deficits in both (with > differences between subsystems). The DRM subsystem has done, as far as I can tell, an good job at creating a safe and welcoming environment. Dave and Daniel both indicated they don't have much new to say about the multi-committer model, but maybe they could have lessons to offer on the human side ? This is a topic that may be difficult to discuss publicly though, as it often touches personal stories of abusive behaviour patterns noticed through various communities. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 9:46 ` Jan Kara 2023-08-22 10:10 ` Christian Brauner @ 2023-08-22 11:05 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-22 11:32 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-22 13:30 ` Jan Kara 1 sibling, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Leon Romanovsky @ 2023-08-22 11:05 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jan Kara Cc: Vegard Nossum, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 11:46:13AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote: > On Mon 21-08-23 21:23:18, Vegard Nossum wrote: > > On 8/19/23 08:45, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > > > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors > > > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. > > > > > > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we > > > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. > > > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their > > > upstream work. > > > > For some drive-by or would-be reviewers, at least, I think part of the > > problem is perverse or misaligned incentives. > > > > If you write code and your patches are accepted in the kernel, it counts > > towards your commit count, which is a metric that people look at, for > > better or worse (probably worse). > > > > When you review a patch and you find some problem with it, the patch > > will NOT get accepted in the kernel (at least not in that form), and > > your name will NOT appear in the git log. So in a way, in order for > > your contribution to get recorded, you have to give the patch a > > passing grade -OR- you are now on the hook to keep reviewing every > > following iteration of the patch until it's in a state where you're > > completely sure it doesn't have any problems. > > > > (Of course, if you just rubber-stamp your Reviewed-by: on everything > > then you are bound to be found out sooner or later -- or at the very > > least seen as an unreliable reviewer.) > > > > But let's assume you don't give out your Reviewed-by: without having > > REALLY checked the patch thoroughly. Even then, mistakes can slip in. > > In a way, being a reviewer and missing something critical is even > > worse than being the author and missing something critical. Is it even > > worth putting your Reviewed-by: on something if you're not 100% sure > > this patch is not going to cause an issue? Are people going to trust > > you in the future if you make a mistake in your review? > > > > Let's say you're completely sure you found an issue with the patch. Why > > not just stay silent, hope that nobody catches it, and then submit your > > own patch later to fix it? That will get your name in the log. Even > > worse, if it's a security issue you can maybe write an exploit for it > > and either get a bounty from Google or sell it for serious $$$ to > > various malicious actors. [Note that I'm not saying most people would do > > this; I don't know. I am just using it as an example to show that the > > incentives are disproportionate.] > > > > The incentives that remain (as far as I can tell) are: > > > > 1) you get familiar with a specific part of the kernel, and > > 2) you get goodwill and recognition from other kernel developers. > > I agree it is good to create positive incentives to provide good review. > But I believe what really makes people do good reviews is the sense of > common responsibility. Agree as long as "people" word includes whole community together with maintainers to share common responsibility. Some maintainers feel too much ownership other their subsystems and it causes to the lack of trust from everybody involved in the process and common responsibility can't be built in that subsystems at all. Thanks ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 11:05 ` Leon Romanovsky @ 2023-08-22 11:32 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-22 13:47 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-22 13:30 ` Jan Kara 1 sibling, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-22 11:32 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Leon Romanovsky Cc: Jan Kara, Vegard Nossum, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 02:05:23PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 11:46:13AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote: > > On Mon 21-08-23 21:23:18, Vegard Nossum wrote: > > > On 8/19/23 08:45, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > > > > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors > > > > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. > > > > > > > > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we > > > > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. > > > > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their > > > > upstream work. > > > > > > For some drive-by or would-be reviewers, at least, I think part of the > > > problem is perverse or misaligned incentives. > > > > > > If you write code and your patches are accepted in the kernel, it counts > > > towards your commit count, which is a metric that people look at, for > > > better or worse (probably worse). > > > > > > When you review a patch and you find some problem with it, the patch > > > will NOT get accepted in the kernel (at least not in that form), and > > > your name will NOT appear in the git log. So in a way, in order for > > > your contribution to get recorded, you have to give the patch a > > > passing grade -OR- you are now on the hook to keep reviewing every > > > following iteration of the patch until it's in a state where you're > > > completely sure it doesn't have any problems. > > > > > > (Of course, if you just rubber-stamp your Reviewed-by: on everything > > > then you are bound to be found out sooner or later -- or at the very > > > least seen as an unreliable reviewer.) > > > > > > But let's assume you don't give out your Reviewed-by: without having > > > REALLY checked the patch thoroughly. Even then, mistakes can slip in. > > > In a way, being a reviewer and missing something critical is even > > > worse than being the author and missing something critical. Is it even > > > worth putting your Reviewed-by: on something if you're not 100% sure > > > this patch is not going to cause an issue? Are people going to trust > > > you in the future if you make a mistake in your review? > > > > > > Let's say you're completely sure you found an issue with the patch. Why > > > not just stay silent, hope that nobody catches it, and then submit your > > > own patch later to fix it? That will get your name in the log. Even > > > worse, if it's a security issue you can maybe write an exploit for it > > > and either get a bounty from Google or sell it for serious $$$ to > > > various malicious actors. [Note that I'm not saying most people would do > > > this; I don't know. I am just using it as an example to show that the > > > incentives are disproportionate.] > > > > > > The incentives that remain (as far as I can tell) are: > > > > > > 1) you get familiar with a specific part of the kernel, and > > > 2) you get goodwill and recognition from other kernel developers. > > > > I agree it is good to create positive incentives to provide good review. > > But I believe what really makes people do good reviews is the sense of > > common responsibility. > > Agree as long as "people" word includes whole community together with > maintainers to share common responsibility. > > Some maintainers feel too much ownership other their subsystems and it > causes to the lack of trust from everybody involved in the process and > common responsibility can't be built in that subsystems at all. Do we need to organize a workshop for maintainers on how to stop clinging to power ? I'm sure I could learn something there. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 11:32 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-22 13:47 ` Leon Romanovsky 0 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Leon Romanovsky @ 2023-08-22 13:47 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Jan Kara, Vegard Nossum, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 02:32:12PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 02:05:23PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > > On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 11:46:13AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote: > > > On Mon 21-08-23 21:23:18, Vegard Nossum wrote: > > > > On 8/19/23 08:45, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > > > > > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors > > > > > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. > > > > > > > > > > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we > > > > > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. > > > > > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their > > > > > upstream work. <...> > > > > The incentives that remain (as far as I can tell) are: > > > > > > > > 1) you get familiar with a specific part of the kernel, and > > > > 2) you get goodwill and recognition from other kernel developers. > > > > > > I agree it is good to create positive incentives to provide good review. > > > But I believe what really makes people do good reviews is the sense of > > > common responsibility. > > > > Agree as long as "people" word includes whole community together with > > maintainers to share common responsibility. > > > > Some maintainers feel too much ownership other their subsystems and it > > causes to the lack of trust from everybody involved in the process and > > common responsibility can't be built in that subsystems at all. > > Do we need to organize a workshop for maintainers on how to stop > clinging to power ? I'm sure I could learn something there. Probably, everyone who will attend that workshop will need to pass a qualification exam what "maintainer" term means for different groups: * Corporate management * Community * Other kernel developers Thanks > > -- > Regards, > > Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-22 11:05 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-22 11:32 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-22 13:30 ` Jan Kara 1 sibling, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Jan Kara @ 2023-08-22 13:30 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Leon Romanovsky Cc: Jan Kara, Vegard Nossum, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Tue 22-08-23 14:05:23, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 11:46:13AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote: > > On Mon 21-08-23 21:23:18, Vegard Nossum wrote: > > > On 8/19/23 08:45, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > > > > It is worth to try to get honest feedback from active developers/contributors/vendors > > > > what is their "real" excuse for not doing code review. > > > > > > > > I saw in this thread about "have no time to do code review" answers and we > > > > all can relate to it, but IMHO it is just an excuse and not the real reason. > > > > Especially for a people who are employed by big corporations to do their > > > > upstream work. > > > > > > For some drive-by or would-be reviewers, at least, I think part of the > > > problem is perverse or misaligned incentives. > > > > > > If you write code and your patches are accepted in the kernel, it counts > > > towards your commit count, which is a metric that people look at, for > > > better or worse (probably worse). > > > > > > When you review a patch and you find some problem with it, the patch > > > will NOT get accepted in the kernel (at least not in that form), and > > > your name will NOT appear in the git log. So in a way, in order for > > > your contribution to get recorded, you have to give the patch a > > > passing grade -OR- you are now on the hook to keep reviewing every > > > following iteration of the patch until it's in a state where you're > > > completely sure it doesn't have any problems. > > > > > > (Of course, if you just rubber-stamp your Reviewed-by: on everything > > > then you are bound to be found out sooner or later -- or at the very > > > least seen as an unreliable reviewer.) > > > > > > But let's assume you don't give out your Reviewed-by: without having > > > REALLY checked the patch thoroughly. Even then, mistakes can slip in. > > > In a way, being a reviewer and missing something critical is even > > > worse than being the author and missing something critical. Is it even > > > worth putting your Reviewed-by: on something if you're not 100% sure > > > this patch is not going to cause an issue? Are people going to trust > > > you in the future if you make a mistake in your review? > > > > > > Let's say you're completely sure you found an issue with the patch. Why > > > not just stay silent, hope that nobody catches it, and then submit your > > > own patch later to fix it? That will get your name in the log. Even > > > worse, if it's a security issue you can maybe write an exploit for it > > > and either get a bounty from Google or sell it for serious $$$ to > > > various malicious actors. [Note that I'm not saying most people would do > > > this; I don't know. I am just using it as an example to show that the > > > incentives are disproportionate.] > > > > > > The incentives that remain (as far as I can tell) are: > > > > > > 1) you get familiar with a specific part of the kernel, and > > > 2) you get goodwill and recognition from other kernel developers. > > > > I agree it is good to create positive incentives to provide good review. > > But I believe what really makes people do good reviews is the sense of > > common responsibility. > > Agree as long as "people" word includes whole community together with > maintainers to share common responsibility. > > Some maintainers feel too much ownership other their subsystems and it > causes to the lack of trust from everybody involved in the process and > common responsibility can't be built in that subsystems at all. I agree. People can hardly have common responsibility when they have the feeling their opinion doesn't really matter for the maintainer. Honza -- Jan Kara <jack@suse.com> SUSE Labs, CR ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum 2023-08-22 4:07 ` Dave Airlie 2023-08-22 9:46 ` Jan Kara @ 2023-08-29 12:54 ` Steven Rostedt 2023-09-13 9:02 ` Dan Carpenter 3 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Steven Rostedt @ 2023-08-29 12:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Vegard Nossum Cc: Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Mon, 21 Aug 2023 21:23:18 +0200 Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com> wrote: > Can we maybe adjust the standards of the Reviewed-by: tag to mean that > the person has looked at the patch (or an earlier version of it) and > provided comments that show they actually put some effort into it? > For example, if a patch is changing a function (as patches often do), > the reviewer should add a line saying "error paths in foo() lgtm" > and not just tack on their Reviewed-by: line. > > This adjustment would make it harder to just slap a Reviewed-by: on a > patch, but it would also make it easier to get your name in the > changelog provided that you actually put the effort in. Note, when I can't do a real review, I just slap an Acked-by tag to it. That to me means LGTM, but I haven't looked deep into it. -- Steve ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2023-08-29 12:54 ` Steven Rostedt @ 2023-09-13 9:02 ` Dan Carpenter 3 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Dan Carpenter @ 2023-09-13 9:02 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Vegard Nossum Cc: Leon Romanovsky, Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 09:23:18PM +0200, Vegard Nossum wrote: > Let's say you're completely sure you found an issue with the patch. Why > not just stay silent, hope that nobody catches it, and then submit your > own patch later to fix it? That will get your name in the log. Even > worse, if it's a security issue you can maybe write an exploit for it > and either get a bounty from Google or sell it for serious $$$ to > various malicious actors. [Note that I'm not saying most people would do > this; I don't know. I am just using it as an example to show that the > incentives are disproportionate.] Every year, I say that there should be a tag for people who find bugs during reviews (no credit for style complaints) "Bug-fix-from:". I think it would be a lot of fun to collect these tags. The whole tagging system is already gamified so we might as well use it to encourage good behavior. regards, dan carpenter ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 17:07 ` Linus Torvalds 2023-08-19 6:45 ` Leon Romanovsky @ 2023-08-21 8:50 ` Daniel Vetter 2023-08-21 15:18 ` Jakub Kicinski 2023-08-22 4:12 ` Dave Airlie 1 sibling, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Daniel Vetter @ 2023-08-21 8:50 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 19:07, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote: > > On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 17:10, Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote: > > > > I was wondering last time if we can do a run of short sessions > > where a few volunteers talk about their subsystems? Let's say > > 10min talking about > > - current process subsystem uses > > - "realities" / day to day challenges / problems > > - how the subsystem is evolving the process > > I feel like we did exactly that a few years in a row, but it was > probably back before covid times, and probably when it was still > called the "kernel summit" rather than "maintainer summit". > > At that point it was mainly just the GPU and ARM people who were doing it. > > [ Goes back and looks at my old ksummit mails ] > > Heh. It seems we did it enough that during the 2018 discussion, we had > Daniel Vetter say "We don't need another overview over group > maintainership". I think most of this was 2016/17 or so, and then by > 2018 we had that "not again.." situation. > > But I suspect that all predates the networking people starting to do > the group maintainership (I think you started doing pull requests in > 2020?), so I guess you never saw any of that. > > I do think the whole "how to spread the pain of being a maintainer" is > very much the point of the maintainer summit, though, so I do think we > should revisit. I think hearing what the networking folks do would be rather interesting, maybe in a split format with a presentation for the entire lpc audience and then maintainer summit discussion with the small group. There's a lot more maintainers and area leaders than the 30 or so who can participate in the maintainer summit. For gpu not much really has changed in the process and approach, it seems to hold up the test of time. The one thing that's been under progress and might finally land is some CI integration with our gitlab.freedesktop.org infrastructure. We have that for years for the userspace side (including hw testing) and some kernel drivers, but not yet for the entire gpu subsystem. Which is pain because it results in a lot of duplicated work and stuff falling through cracks for no good reasons. I'm hoping that this merge window will finally have the pull with the initial thing (all contained in a dedicated directory so it's easy to delete in case it all turns out to be a big mistake). So there's really nothing to report from the GPU side, and I think my quote from 2018 still holds :-) Cheers, Daniel -- Daniel Vetter Software Engineer, Intel Corporation http://blog.ffwll.ch ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-21 8:50 ` Daniel Vetter @ 2023-08-21 15:18 ` Jakub Kicinski 2023-08-22 4:12 ` Dave Airlie 1 sibling, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Jakub Kicinski @ 2023-08-21 15:18 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Daniel Vetter Cc: Linus Torvalds, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Mon, 21 Aug 2023 10:50:04 +0200 Daniel Vetter wrote: > I think hearing what the networking folks do would be rather > interesting, maybe in a split format with a presentation for the > entire lpc audience and then maintainer summit discussion with the > small group. There's a lot more maintainers and area leaders than the > 30 or so who can participate in the maintainer summit. Right, no preference on the forum. I'd basically like to compare notes with other people who are trying things. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-21 8:50 ` Daniel Vetter 2023-08-21 15:18 ` Jakub Kicinski @ 2023-08-22 4:12 ` Dave Airlie 1 sibling, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Dave Airlie @ 2023-08-22 4:12 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Daniel Vetter Cc: Linus Torvalds, Jakub Kicinski, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Andrew Lunn, Laurent Pinchart, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Mon, 21 Aug 2023 at 18:50, Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch> wrote: > > On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 19:07, Linus Torvalds > <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote: > > > > On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 17:10, Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote: > > > > > > I was wondering last time if we can do a run of short sessions > > > where a few volunteers talk about their subsystems? Let's say > > > 10min talking about > > > - current process subsystem uses > > > - "realities" / day to day challenges / problems > > > - how the subsystem is evolving the process > > > > I feel like we did exactly that a few years in a row, but it was > > probably back before covid times, and probably when it was still > > called the "kernel summit" rather than "maintainer summit". > > > > At that point it was mainly just the GPU and ARM people who were doing it. > > > > [ Goes back and looks at my old ksummit mails ] > > > > Heh. It seems we did it enough that during the 2018 discussion, we had > > Daniel Vetter say "We don't need another overview over group > > maintainership". I think most of this was 2016/17 or so, and then by > > 2018 we had that "not again.." situation. > > > > But I suspect that all predates the networking people starting to do > > the group maintainership (I think you started doing pull requests in > > 2020?), so I guess you never saw any of that. > > > > I do think the whole "how to spread the pain of being a maintainer" is > > very much the point of the maintainer summit, though, so I do think we > > should revisit. > > I think hearing what the networking folks do would be rather > interesting, maybe in a split format with a presentation for the > entire lpc audience and then maintainer summit discussion with the > small group. There's a lot more maintainers and area leaders than the > 30 or so who can participate in the maintainer summit. > > For gpu not much really has changed in the process and approach, it > seems to hold up the test of time. The one thing that's been under > progress and might finally land is some CI integration with our > gitlab.freedesktop.org infrastructure. We have that for years for the > userspace side (including hw testing) and some kernel drivers, but not > yet for the entire gpu subsystem. Which is pain because it results in > a lot of duplicated work and stuff falling through cracks for no good > reasons. I'm hoping that this merge window will finally have the pull > with the initial thing (all contained in a dedicated directory so it's > easy to delete in case it all turns out to be a big mistake). > > So there's really nothing to report from the GPU side, and I think my > quote from 2018 still holds :-) > Yeah I think this is spot-on, our process works for us, I believe when we've presented in the past, most of the feedback has been "why are you telling us this? your process can't work for <insert niche maintainer concern>." But our process probably also relies on the fact that we have a massive community that exists adjacent to the kernel and we can get away with doing crazy shit because I've personally never been attached to some OCD'ed niche email setup optimised for the mutt installation I hand wrote that a lot of maintainers end up using. I do hope we can get some movement on CI integration and possibly gitlab merge requests next year, but again I'm not driving us there, I'm mostly happy to adapt to whatever the community comes up with, and act as the "I'll explain this to Linus" person. Dave. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 13:55 ` Linus Walleij 2023-08-18 15:09 ` Jakub Kicinski @ 2023-08-18 15:26 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 15:40 ` Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk ` (2 more replies) 1 sibling, 3 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-18 15:26 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Linus Walleij Cc: Alexei Starovoitov, Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote: > Alexei, thanks for returning the conversation > to this very important topic. > > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 1:55 AM Alexei Starovoitov wrote: > > > BPF has solid CI that helps a lot, but the maintainer burnout is acutely felt. > > The main reason for burnout is patch flood. > > I agree this is an important cause. > Even worse is any kind of social conflict or bad mood in the community. > Science has studied stress, what we mostly run into is called "microstress". > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_stress > > > The maintainer's day looks like non-stop code review. > > The patch backlog just doesn't end. > > I've been there too :( I think most of us know the feeling. Personally, if my workload reaches 100% review for an extended period of time, without having any time for "fun" activities such as hacking, I'm pretty sure my review efficiency drops drastically. Maybe that's call burn out. > > We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well > > via positive/negative scores: > > https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/ > > > > It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume > > that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews. > > Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that > > reviewing other patches will help them land their own. > > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little > bit. > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you > will review and also merge their stuff in return. > Sometimes this works. > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full > time on similar things, yay! So much support. > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well. > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to > review and you feel like begging. > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed. I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking contributors to review patches that are directly related to their business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their patches. The contributor helped with reviewing third-party contributions to the driver they're actively working on. When I asked for help reviewing an entirely separate driver that their employer had no business interest in, however, I faced the "we're busy and don't have time" argument. Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources, to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest. > > To address maintainer burnout we need to change the culture of the community > > and transform active developers to active code reviewers. > > We're looking for ideas on how to do that. > > I agree. > > To deal with the symptoms (feeling stressed) when it gets too much > for me personally I have different coping mechanisms. > > The basic idea is to do stuff that generate the opposite of stress. > This could be outside of work, but also working on stuff in the > kernel that gives a feeling of immediate accomplishment and > closure is good. > > Such as maintaining some drivers and systems that are old, > so nobody is begging you to fix it now now now. Paying of some > old techical debt. That's nice. > > Drilling into a specific bug that is not urgent can also be very > de-stressing, it's hard work but nobody is dependent on you > fixing it now. You don't even need to come up with a solution. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 15:26 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-18 15:40 ` Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk 2023-08-18 18:36 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-18 16:10 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-24 21:30 ` Jonathan Cameron 2 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk @ 2023-08-18 15:40 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:26:29PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote: > > Alexei, thanks for returning the conversation > > to this very important topic. > > > > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 1:55 AM Alexei Starovoitov wrote: > > > > > BPF has solid CI that helps a lot, but the maintainer burnout is acutely felt. > > > The main reason for burnout is patch flood. > > > > I agree this is an important cause. > > Even worse is any kind of social conflict or bad mood in the community. > > Science has studied stress, what we mostly run into is called "microstress". > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_stress > > > > > The maintainer's day looks like non-stop code review. > > > The patch backlog just doesn't end. > > > > I've been there too :( > > I think most of us know the feeling. Personally, if my workload reaches > 100% review for an extended period of time, without having any time for > "fun" activities such as hacking, I'm pretty sure my review efficiency > drops drastically. Maybe that's call burn out. > > > > We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well > > > via positive/negative scores: > > > https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/ > > > > > > It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume > > > that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews. > > > Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that > > > reviewing other patches will help them land their own. > > > > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little > > bit. > > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you > > will review and also merge their stuff in return. > > Sometimes this works. > > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full > > time on similar things, yay! So much support. > > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well. > > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to > > review and you feel like begging. > > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed. > > I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's > certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking > contributors to review patches that are directly related to their > business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company > to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their > patches. The contributor helped with reviewing third-party contributions > to the driver they're actively working on. When I asked for help > reviewing an entirely separate driver that their employer had no > business interest in, however, I faced the "we're busy and don't have > time" argument. > > Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to > expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources, > to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in > their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest. May I add an point that I had struggled in the past with (and it could be very well this is not an issue in your subsystem in which case please ignore it): This idea assumes you trust them to have the same level of expertise that you have. That is say they do a review but miss the more esoteric semantics (say hardware quirks that are documented but only for folks that *grok* the hardware). You may know it, but they don't. You accept their patches and months later it all blows up. You are unhappy, Linus is screaming about it. Burn-out ++. Perhaps the question should be: How to grow the community so that members collectively have the same knowledge as you? (And then you can take days off without feeling guily. Burn-out --). ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 15:40 ` Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk @ 2023-08-18 18:36 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-21 16:13 ` Laurent Pinchart 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Mark Brown @ 2023-08-18 18:36 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk Cc: Laurent Pinchart, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1928 bytes --] On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 11:40:32AM -0400, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:26:29PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to > > expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources, > > to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in > > their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest. > May I add an point that I had struggled in the past with (and it could > be very well this is not an issue in your subsystem in which case please > ignore it): > This idea assumes you trust them to have the same level of expertise > that you have. > That is say they do a review but miss the more esoteric semantics (say > hardware quirks that are documented but only for folks that *grok* the > hardware). You may know it, but they don't. You accept their patches and > months later it all blows up. You are unhappy, Linus is screaming about > it. Burn-out ++. For those of us working more with drivers for embedded systems this can be a bit different in that for a lot of drivers realistically nobody is going to have access to the hardware outside of a fully integrated product, including you. I remember talking with someone submitting drivers for devices like that and them being surprised that I was much more focused on if the driver was a pain for subsystem integration and ongoing maintainance than if this undocumented thing I had no access to worked. Of course it's not like you can completely ignore things and some drivers get more exposure to general users than others, but it does help quite a bit to feed into the risk profile of patches. > Perhaps the question should be: How to grow the community so that members > collectively have the same knowledge as you? And also identify the areas where that's already happening and actually take advantage of that fact. [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 488 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 18:36 ` Mark Brown @ 2023-08-21 16:13 ` Laurent Pinchart 0 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-21 16:13 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Mark Brown Cc: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk, Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 07:36:44PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 11:40:32AM -0400, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:26:29PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > > > > > Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to > > > expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources, > > > to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in > > > their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest. > > > > May I add an point that I had struggled in the past with (and it could > > be very well this is not an issue in your subsystem in which case please > > ignore it): > > > > This idea assumes you trust them to have the same level of expertise > > that you have. > > > > That is say they do a review but miss the more esoteric semantics (say > > hardware quirks that are documented but only for folks that *grok* the > > hardware). You may know it, but they don't. You accept their patches and > > months later it all blows up. You are unhappy, Linus is screaming about > > it. Burn-out ++. > > For those of us working more with drivers for embedded systems this can > be a bit different in that for a lot of drivers realistically nobody is > going to have access to the hardware outside of a fully integrated > product, including you. I remember talking with someone submitting > drivers for devices like that and them being surprised that I was much > more focused on if the driver was a pain for subsystem integration and > ongoing maintainance than if this undocumented thing I had no access to > worked. As I wrote in a separate e-mail in this thread, my main focus with a subsystem core developer/maintainer hat is usage of in-kernel and userspace APIs. This is related to subsystem ongoing maintenance, as badly used in-kernel APIs will hinder future refactoring, and badly used userspace APIs will need to be kept forever as we can't break userspace that depends on them. This knowledge is easier (by not easy) to build across a larger number of developers, compared to device-specific knowledge. With my other hat of driver maintainer, I'm certainly more conservative reviewing patches for drivers that are used by a very large number of people, for fear of introducing breakages. Automated tests can help to some extent, but I don't have a good answer to this problem. > Of course it's not like you can completely ignore things and some > drivers get more exposure to general users than others, but it does help > quite a bit to feed into the risk profile of patches. > > > Perhaps the question should be: How to grow the community so that members > > collectively have the same knowledge as you? > > And also identify the areas where that's already happening and actually > take advantage of that fact. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 15:26 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 15:40 ` Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk @ 2023-08-18 16:10 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-21 16:04 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-24 21:30 ` Jonathan Cameron 2 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Mark Brown @ 2023-08-18 16:10 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2077 bytes --] On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:26:29PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote: > > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little > > bit. > > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you > > will review and also merge their stuff in return. > > Sometimes this works. > > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full > > time on similar things, yay! So much support. > > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well. > > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to > > review and you feel like begging. > > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed. > I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's > certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking > contributors to review patches that are directly related to their > business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company > to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their > patches. The contributor helped with reviewing third-party contributions > to the driver they're actively working on. When I asked for help > reviewing an entirely separate driver that their employer had no > business interest in, however, I faced the "we're busy and don't have > time" argument. > Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to > expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources, > to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in > their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest. That issue with people having the background knowledge needed to adequately review things they don't have specific experience with can be a problem here. It's not typically *harmful* other than issues with people doing disproportionately pedantic reviews (which can be a problem) but you do still need to keep an eye on things it can feel a bit make work so there's a balance with making it an explicit requirement. [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 488 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 16:10 ` Mark Brown @ 2023-08-21 16:04 ` Laurent Pinchart 0 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-21 16:04 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Mark Brown Cc: Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 05:10:07PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:26:29PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote: > > > > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little > > > bit. > > > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you > > > will review and also merge their stuff in return. > > > Sometimes this works. > > > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full > > > time on similar things, yay! So much support. > > > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well. > > > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to > > > review and you feel like begging. > > > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed. > > > I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's > > certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking > > contributors to review patches that are directly related to their > > business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company > > to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their > > patches. The contributor helped with reviewing third-party contributions > > to the driver they're actively working on. When I asked for help > > reviewing an entirely separate driver that their employer had no > > business interest in, however, I faced the "we're busy and don't have > > time" argument. > > > > Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to > > expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources, > > to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in > > their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest. > > That issue with people having the background knowledge needed to > adequately review things they don't have specific experience with can be > a problem here. It's not typically *harmful* other than issues with > people doing disproportionately pedantic reviews (which can be a > problem) but you do still need to keep an eye on things it can feel a > bit make work so there's a balance with making it an explicit > requirement. Most of my reviews point of issues with usage of in-kernel and userspace APIs, rather than problems specific to the hardware at hand. Developers who contribute drivers with similar usage patterns of APIs should be able to help there. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 15:26 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 15:40 ` Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk 2023-08-18 16:10 ` Mark Brown @ 2023-08-24 21:30 ` Jonathan Cameron 2023-08-25 7:05 ` Krzysztof Kozlowski 2 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Jonathan Cameron @ 2023-08-24 21:30 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 18:26:29 +0300 Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote: > > Alexei, thanks for returning the conversation > > to this very important topic. > > > > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 1:55 AM Alexei Starovoitov wrote: > > > > > BPF has solid CI that helps a lot, but the maintainer burnout is acutely felt. > > > The main reason for burnout is patch flood. > > > > I agree this is an important cause. > > Even worse is any kind of social conflict or bad mood in the community. > > Science has studied stress, what we mostly run into is called "microstress". > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_stress > > > > > The maintainer's day looks like non-stop code review. > > > The patch backlog just doesn't end. > > > > I've been there too :( > > I think most of us know the feeling. Personally, if my workload reaches > 100% review for an extended period of time, without having any time for > "fun" activities such as hacking, I'm pretty sure my review efficiency > drops drastically. Maybe that's call burn out. Agreed. Return from vacations is particularly painful. I'm lucky in that I have some excellent reviewers for IIO who seem to mostly do it for fun but I've hit rock bottom a few times in the past and reached out to major contributors (companies) who have stepped up to help. Other areas I'm involved in are still at the earlier stage where everyone wants the subsystem to do more and there is good understanding that won't happen without many people stepping up to review. (e.g. CXL) > > > > We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well > > > via positive/negative scores: > > > https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/ > > > > > > It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume > > > that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews. > > > Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that > > > reviewing other patches will help them land their own. > > > > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little > > bit. > > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you > > will review and also merge their stuff in return. > > Sometimes this works. > > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full > > time on similar things, yay! So much support. > > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well. > > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to > > review and you feel like begging. > > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed. > > I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's > certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking > contributors to review patches that are directly related to their > business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company > to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their > patches. Personally I like to point out to our kernel teams that if a maintainer is ignoring you (too busy), the best thing is to help (guilt trip) them by reviewing anything else you can find they haven't gotten to yet. Added 'benefit' beyond learning more about the area is you often end suggesting changes for the other outstanding patches resulting a new version of their patches that is further down in patchwork or similar so maintainer tends to get to yours quicker... > The contributor helped with reviewing third-party contributions > to the driver they're actively working on. When I asked for help > reviewing an entirely separate driver that their employer had no > business interest in, however, I faced the "we're busy and don't have > time" argument. Absolutely - it's much easier when you can find someone who at least somewhat cares about the code that needs reviewing. > > Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to > expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources, > to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in > their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest. It's hard to encourage that expectation. I've had many internal conversations about this in Huawei and we are trying a few things, but it's not trivial to pull off even with the right noises from senior management. Jonathan ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-24 21:30 ` Jonathan Cameron @ 2023-08-25 7:05 ` Krzysztof Kozlowski 0 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Krzysztof Kozlowski @ 2023-08-25 7:05 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jonathan Cameron, Laurent Pinchart Cc: Linus Walleij, Alexei Starovoitov, Jakub Kicinski, Andrew Lunn, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On 24/08/2023 23:30, Jonathan Cameron wrote: >>>> We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well >>>> via positive/negative scores: >>>> https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/ >>>> >>>> It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume >>>> that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews. >>>> Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that >>>> reviewing other patches will help them land their own. >>> >>> The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little >>> bit. >>> Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you >>> will review and also merge their stuff in return. >>> Sometimes this works. >>> Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full >>> time on similar things, yay! So much support. >>> When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well. >>> Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to >>> review and you feel like begging. >>> So different solutions for different contributors may be needed. >> >> I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's >> certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking >> contributors to review patches that are directly related to their >> business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company >> to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their >> patches. > > Personally I like to point out to our kernel teams that if a maintainer > is ignoring you (too busy), the best thing is to help (guilt trip) them > by reviewing anything else you can find they haven't gotten to yet. > Added 'benefit' beyond learning more about the area is you often end > suggesting changes for the other outstanding patches resulting a new version > of their patches that is further down in patchwork or similar so maintainer > tends to get to yours quicker... I'll start responding with this to pings on LKML. I think Greg already does for some cases. Best regards, Krzysztof ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-16 20:14 ` Luis Chamberlain 2023-08-17 9:39 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-17 12:00 ` Jani Nikula 2023-08-17 12:17 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-17 14:22 ` Steven Rostedt 1 sibling, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Jani Nikula @ 2023-08-17 12:00 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik; +Cc: ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Wed, 16 Aug 2023, Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org> wrote: > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even > worth reviewing. I'm all for automated testing and CI, and all i915 patches get tested before merging. But requiring everything to pass before a human so much as looks at it can be incredibly demotivating for contributors. For example, if they polish the contribution, and take all corner cases into consideration to pass the tests... and then get told their design is all wrong and needs to be redone from scratch. It's a balance. BR, Jani. -- Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 12:00 ` Jani Nikula @ 2023-08-17 12:17 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-17 12:42 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 14:22 ` Steven Rostedt 1 sibling, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Mark Brown @ 2023-08-17 12:17 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jani Nikula; +Cc: Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1347 bytes --] On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 03:00:57PM +0300, Jani Nikula wrote: > On Wed, 16 Aug 2023, Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org> wrote: > > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement > > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then > > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. > > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* > > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even > > worth reviewing. > I'm all for automated testing and CI, and all i915 patches get tested > before merging. But requiring everything to pass before a human so much > as looks at it can be incredibly demotivating for contributors. For > example, if they polish the contribution, and take all corner cases into > consideration to pass the tests... and then get told their design is all > wrong and needs to be redone from scratch. It's a balance. Indeed, and you're relying on your test automation being robust, the results being available promptly and the results being comprehensible if people can't readily run the tests themselves. That said I read the above as more providing results so people can look at them rather than gating looking at things (eg, if everything is failing it's probably fine to not bother) - that seems a lot more reasonable. [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 488 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 12:17 ` Mark Brown @ 2023-08-17 12:42 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 13:56 ` Miguel Ojeda 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Mark Brown 0 siblings, 2 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-17 12:42 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Mark Brown Cc: Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 01:17:39PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote: > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 03:00:57PM +0300, Jani Nikula wrote: > > On Wed, 16 Aug 2023, Luis Chamberlain wrote: > > > > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement > > > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then > > > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. > > > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* > > > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even > > > worth reviewing. > > > I'm all for automated testing and CI, and all i915 patches get tested > > before merging. But requiring everything to pass before a human so much > > as looks at it can be incredibly demotivating for contributors. For > > example, if they polish the contribution, and take all corner cases into > > consideration to pass the tests... and then get told their design is all > > wrong and needs to be redone from scratch. It's a balance. > > Indeed, and you're relying on your test automation being robust, the > results being available promptly and the results being comprehensible if > people can't readily run the tests themselves. That said I read the > above as more providing results so people can look at them rather than > gating looking at things (eg, if everything is failing it's probably > fine to not bother) - that seems a lot more reasonable. I think the rules will need to be somehow flexible. As Jani mentioned, there's a genuine need to be able to discuss design questions before a patch series reaches perfection (experienced developers will usually know that they should mark their series as RFC in that case, but newcomers may not have this tribal knowledge). On the other hand, I'm not going to discuss the design behind a patch series if the code is intended with 3 spaces and uses CamelCase. Reports from automated tests, or automated reviews, should be designed to help the submitter, not to scold and discourage them. I'm pretty sure we can come up with wording that will be nicer to read than what I would write when being tired at 3:00am, repeating the same comment for the 50th time. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 12:42 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-17 13:56 ` Miguel Ojeda 2023-08-17 15:03 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Mark Brown 1 sibling, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Miguel Ojeda @ 2023-08-17 13:56 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Mark Brown, Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 2:42 PM Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote: > > I think the rules will need to be somehow flexible. As Jani mentioned, > there's a genuine need to be able to discuss design questions before a > patch series reaches perfection (experienced developers will usually > know that they should mark their series as RFC in that case, but > newcomers may not have this tribal knowledge). On the other hand, I'm > not going to discuss the design behind a patch series if the code is > intended with 3 spaces and uses CamelCase. > > Reports from automated tests, or automated reviews, should be designed > to help the submitter, not to scold and discourage them. I'm pretty sure > we can come up with wording that will be nicer to read than what I would > write when being tired at 3:00am, repeating the same comment for the > 50th time. I think the bot should simply reply commenting on the issues it has found, without judging whether the patch should or should not be reviewed (and the bot could perhaps explicitly say so to avoid submitters getting discouraged). Then, depending on what the bot finds, i.e. the amount and kind of issues, reviewers can decide and reply as needed. RFC patches could be skipped by the bot. This would already save a ton of time for reviewers, and it would help new contributors understand the requirements. However, a worry that I have about such a system is if people start to spam unprepared patches until they pass. If that becomes a problem, then a possible solution could be to have a staging list for that (or server or similar). Cheers, Miguel ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 13:56 ` Miguel Ojeda @ 2023-08-17 15:03 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 17:41 ` Miguel Ojeda 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-17 15:03 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Miguel Ojeda Cc: Mark Brown, Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 03:56:43PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote: > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 2:42 PM Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > > > I think the rules will need to be somehow flexible. As Jani mentioned, > > there's a genuine need to be able to discuss design questions before a > > patch series reaches perfection (experienced developers will usually > > know that they should mark their series as RFC in that case, but > > newcomers may not have this tribal knowledge). On the other hand, I'm > > not going to discuss the design behind a patch series if the code is > > intended with 3 spaces and uses CamelCase. > > > > Reports from automated tests, or automated reviews, should be designed > > to help the submitter, not to scold and discourage them. I'm pretty sure > > we can come up with wording that will be nicer to read than what I would > > write when being tired at 3:00am, repeating the same comment for the > > 50th time. > > I think the bot should simply reply commenting on the issues it has > found, without judging whether the patch should or should not be > reviewed (and the bot could perhaps explicitly say so to avoid > submitters getting discouraged). > > Then, depending on what the bot finds, i.e. the amount and kind of > issues, reviewers can decide and reply as needed. RFC patches could be > skipped by the bot. This defeats a little bit the point of lowering the workload of reviewers though, if they have to review each bot report and reply to it manually :-) > This would already save a ton of time for reviewers, and it would help > new contributors understand the requirements. > > However, a worry that I have about such a system is if people start to > spam unprepared patches until they pass. If that becomes a problem, > then a possible solution could be to have a staging list for that (or > server or similar). -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 15:03 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-17 17:41 ` Miguel Ojeda 2023-08-18 15:30 ` Laurent Pinchart 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Miguel Ojeda @ 2023-08-17 17:41 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Mark Brown, Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 5:03 PM Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 03:56:43PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote: > > > I think the bot should simply reply commenting on the issues it has > > found, without judging whether the patch should or should not be > > reviewed (and the bot could perhaps explicitly say so to avoid > > submitters getting discouraged). > > > > Then, depending on what the bot finds, i.e. the amount and kind of > > issues, reviewers can decide and reply as needed. RFC patches could be > > skipped by the bot. > > This defeats a little bit the point of lowering the workload of > reviewers though, if they have to review each bot report and reply to it > manually :-) No, it does not. The point is that you don't need to point out trivial mistakes anymore, nor devote time to find them. Just by judging the length of the bot's reply and the importance of the spotted issues, you can make an assessment. And, of course, you can also group particular issues as "no-go", so that the bot already says there needs to be most likely a new version (e.g. no SoB, no license, no commit message, bad formatting, build errors...), suited to the particular subsystem. Cheers, Miguel ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 17:41 ` Miguel Ojeda @ 2023-08-18 15:30 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 16:23 ` Mark Brown 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-18 15:30 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Miguel Ojeda Cc: Mark Brown, Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu, Greg KH (CC'ing Greg) On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 07:41:43PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote: > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 5:03 PM Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 03:56:43PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote: > > > > > I think the bot should simply reply commenting on the issues it has > > > found, without judging whether the patch should or should not be > > > reviewed (and the bot could perhaps explicitly say so to avoid > > > submitters getting discouraged). > > > > > > Then, depending on what the bot finds, i.e. the amount and kind of > > > issues, reviewers can decide and reply as needed. RFC patches could be > > > skipped by the bot. > > > > This defeats a little bit the point of lowering the workload of > > reviewers though, if they have to review each bot report and reply to it > > manually :-) > > No, it does not. The point is that you don't need to point out trivial > mistakes anymore, nor devote time to find them. > > Just by judging the length of the bot's reply and the importance of > the spotted issues, you can make an assessment. But you'll still need to reply to the submitter to tell what to expect. As far as I understand, this was considered enough of an issue by Greg to be automated to remove even the human need to push a button, see https://github.com/gregkh/gregkh-linux/blob/master/forms/patch_bot. > And, of course, you can also group particular issues as "no-go", so > that the bot already says there needs to be most likely a new version > (e.g. no SoB, no license, no commit message, bad formatting, build > errors...), suited to the particular subsystem. That would work for me, and I think that's essentially what Greg's bot does. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 15:30 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-18 16:23 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-18 17:17 ` Laurent Pinchart 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Mark Brown @ 2023-08-18 16:23 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Miguel Ojeda, Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu, Greg KH [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 822 bytes --] On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:30:45PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 07:41:43PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote: > > No, it does not. The point is that you don't need to point out trivial > > mistakes anymore, nor devote time to find them. > > Just by judging the length of the bot's reply and the importance of > > the spotted issues, you can make an assessment. > But you'll still need to reply to the submitter to tell what to expect. > As far as I understand, this was considered enough of an issue by Greg > to be automated to remove even the human need to push a button, see > https://github.com/gregkh/gregkh-linux/blob/master/forms/patch_bot. I have a bunch of template mails like that too. One of them includes a general suggestion to fix issues from existing reviews, including bot output. [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 488 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 16:23 ` Mark Brown @ 2023-08-18 17:17 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 18:00 ` Mark Brown 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-18 17:17 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Mark Brown Cc: Miguel Ojeda, Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu, Greg KH On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 05:23:09PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:30:45PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 07:41:43PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote: > > > > No, it does not. The point is that you don't need to point out trivial > > > mistakes anymore, nor devote time to find them. > > > > Just by judging the length of the bot's reply and the importance of > > > the spotted issues, you can make an assessment. > > > But you'll still need to reply to the submitter to tell what to expect. > > As far as I understand, this was considered enough of an issue by Greg > > to be automated to remove even the human need to push a button, see > > https://github.com/gregkh/gregkh-linux/blob/master/forms/patch_bot. > > I have a bunch of template mails like that too. One of them includes a > general suggestion to fix issues from existing reviews, including bot > output. Do you have any automated way to send some of those mails, or is it always manual ? -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-18 17:17 ` Laurent Pinchart @ 2023-08-18 18:00 ` Mark Brown 0 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Mark Brown @ 2023-08-18 18:00 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Miguel Ojeda, Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu, Greg KH [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 548 bytes --] On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 08:17:15PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 05:23:09PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote: > > I have a bunch of template mails like that too. One of them includes a > > general suggestion to fix issues from existing reviews, including bot > > output. > Do you have any automated way to send some of those mails, or is it > always manual ? It's manual, but it's so quick it's not worth automating further - with vi it's just: :r <template-dir>/<file> with tab completion, and I can edit if I'm so moved. [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 488 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 12:42 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 13:56 ` Miguel Ojeda @ 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Mark Brown 1 sibling, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Mark Brown @ 2023-08-17 14:46 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Laurent Pinchart Cc: Jani Nikula, Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 704 bytes --] On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 03:42:55PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > Reports from automated tests, or automated reviews, should be designed > to help the submitter, not to scold and discourage them. I'm pretty sure > we can come up with wording that will be nicer to read than what I would > write when being tired at 3:00am, repeating the same comment for the > 50th time. Honestly I think the risk is more that the tests are noisy than the wording of the mails - that's a real problem with some other projects I occasionally submit to, there's a bunch of CI that spams out that is just worthless. Cultural differences mean we're never going to get to a point where everyone will be happy with mails. [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 488 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 12:00 ` Jani Nikula 2023-08-17 12:17 ` Mark Brown @ 2023-08-17 14:22 ` Steven Rostedt 2023-08-17 15:31 ` Jani Nikula 1 sibling, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Steven Rostedt @ 2023-08-17 14:22 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jani Nikula; +Cc: Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Thu, 17 Aug 2023 15:00:57 +0300 Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@intel.com> wrote: > On Wed, 16 Aug 2023, Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org> wrote: > > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement > > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then > > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. > > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* > > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even > > worth reviewing. > > I'm all for automated testing and CI, and all i915 patches get tested > before merging. But requiring everything to pass before a human so much > as looks at it can be incredibly demotivating for contributors. For > example, if they polish the contribution, and take all corner cases into > consideration to pass the tests... and then get told their design is all > wrong and needs to be redone from scratch. It's a balance. > For big new features, I agree. They shouldn't need to pass all tests. I think anything that has an [RFC] subject should bypass the test requirements. But I get a bunch of fixes patches, that fail tests all the time. If you are sending a fix to something that causes a regression, the maintainer should not be involved. Automated tests should be enough to tell the submitter to go back and redo their patch. -- Steve ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 14:22 ` Steven Rostedt @ 2023-08-17 15:31 ` Jani Nikula 0 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Jani Nikula @ 2023-08-17 15:31 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Steven Rostedt Cc: Luis Chamberlain, Josef Bacik, ksummit, Jeff Layton, Song Liu On Thu, 17 Aug 2023, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote: > On Thu, 17 Aug 2023 15:00:57 +0300 > Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@intel.com> wrote: > >> On Wed, 16 Aug 2023, Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org> wrote: >> > In so far as making it possible to get b) to help, my current excitement >> > surrounds around what Song Liu mentioned to me at LSFMM and then >> > quickly demonstrated that the eBPF folks are doing with patchwork. >> > Get the patches to be tested automatically, and *immediately* >> > patch reviewers and maintainers can get feedback if something is not even >> > worth reviewing. >> >> I'm all for automated testing and CI, and all i915 patches get tested >> before merging. But requiring everything to pass before a human so much >> as looks at it can be incredibly demotivating for contributors. For >> example, if they polish the contribution, and take all corner cases into >> consideration to pass the tests... and then get told their design is all >> wrong and needs to be redone from scratch. It's a balance. >> > > For big new features, I agree. They shouldn't need to pass all tests. I > think anything that has an [RFC] subject should bypass the test > requirements. But I get a bunch of fixes patches, that fail tests all the > time. If you are sending a fix to something that causes a regression, the > maintainer should not be involved. Automated tests should be enough to tell > the submitter to go back and redo their patch. Agreed. BR, Jani. -- Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-16 18:08 [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout Josef Bacik 2023-08-16 20:14 ` Luis Chamberlain @ 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Steven Rostedt 2023-08-17 15:33 ` Josef Bacik 1 sibling, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Steven Rostedt @ 2023-08-17 14:46 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josef Bacik; +Cc: ksummit, James Bottomley On Wed, 16 Aug 2023 14:08:08 -0400 Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com> wrote: > Hello, FYI, James Bottomely posted a very similar topic: https://lore.kernel.org/all/ab9cfd857e32635f626a906410ad95877a22f0db.camel@HansenPartnership.com/ > > This is a topic we're beating to death but haven't really made decent progress > on WRT real solutions. I know I have advocated for adding even more > responsibilties to maintainers plates, which isn't really helpful. > > There is a lot in this email, so I suppose choose your own adventure when it > comes to what we think is relevant to discuss. > > Maintainers/long time developers are burning out. At the same time there's > frustration from new comers who have trouble getting their patches accepted. We > have instances of arguments between longtime developers which leads to more > frustration because it drags on the development process. I'm still working on the "Communicaton style" documents (one for Maintainers to new contributors, and more importantly, one for new/existing contributors on how to communicate to maintainers and what to expect.) These documents will focus on looking at the POV of the other side. For the how to talk to maintainers, it will discuss that maintainers have to make sure their subsystems works for everyone, and not just for the new contributor. But being a maintainer myself with a full-time job that is not to do my maintainership, I'm struggling to find time to work on this :-p > > I have argued for the last few years that maintainers should be taking a more > active role in the social side of our development process. Be the grownups in > the room and help mitigate these conflicts before they sour relationships. The "How to talk to contributors" document will try to address some of this. > > But this just adds to the long list of things that maintainers already need to > do. Oftentimes they are the only reviewers, testers, and main developers rolled > into one. We have an increase of automated testing, which while is a net > positive, adds to the stress of maintainers who view these reports as their > personal responsibilty to address. > > We all work differently, so having big sweeping solutions is a non-starter. > However I think there are things we can learn from eachother to encourage > different thinking and thus result in a smoother development experience for all > of us. I've been advocating in the TAB meetings for a "maintainer 'support group'". Basically where stressed out maintainers can join to talk to other stressed out maintainers and hopefully find a way to become less stressed out. > > Patch review: Obviously more people the better, encouraging review by trading > reviews for having developers patches reviewed is a good method, but this only > works for sufficiently large communities. > > Automated testing: This doesn't replace review, but it can help add confidence > when you're accepting patch reviews from less experienced members. > > De-prioritize automated reports: Syzbot is great, but the failure cases can be > sporadic and difficult to reproduce. Things that are bisected to a specific > patch are obviously easy to tackle, but don't let yourself get overwhelmed by > syzbot, they're good things to hand to new developers to cut their teeth on. I ignore pretty much any syzbot report that is not truly bisectable, as I've spent too much time on them in the past to only find out that the bug is in another subsystem. I won't totally ignore them. I do look at them to see if it's obviously a bug in my subsystem, but if not, then it's ignored. > > Maintainer groups, not sole maintainers: We all have things going on, build up > people you trust and develop a way to spread the maintenance load. This goes along with my "support group" idea. > > Automate everything: I hate email, that is no secret, but even with email we can > automate a lot of things. The btrfs team built out the GH CI so developers can > drive their own testing, spreading the load. Eventually I hope to get to the > point where the merging of patches is automated away so we don't have to deal > with those mechanics. I think sharing ideas on how people automate is a good one. Not many people know that the tip tree has a special branch called "tip" and there's a directory in the top level called ".tip" which includes all the automated tooling that the tip tree has. -- Steve > > Developing strategies to handle the more mundane tasks of managing our projects > will help free us to engage better with our communities, and guide people to be > better developers, feeding back into the ecosystem that will help reduce the > pain. Thanks, > > Josef ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Steven Rostedt @ 2023-08-17 15:33 ` Josef Bacik 2023-08-17 17:10 ` Rodrigo Vivi 0 siblings, 1 reply; 54+ messages in thread From: Josef Bacik @ 2023-08-17 15:33 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Steven Rostedt; +Cc: ksummit, James Bottomley On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 10:46:22AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > On Wed, 16 Aug 2023 14:08:08 -0400 > Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com> wrote: > > > Hello, > > FYI, James Bottomely posted a very similar topic: > > https://lore.kernel.org/all/ab9cfd857e32635f626a906410ad95877a22f0db.camel@HansenPartnership.com/ > Oh good I didn't see this, James and I have similar views on this topic. > > > > This is a topic we're beating to death but haven't really made decent progress > > on WRT real solutions. I know I have advocated for adding even more > > responsibilties to maintainers plates, which isn't really helpful. > > > > There is a lot in this email, so I suppose choose your own adventure when it > > comes to what we think is relevant to discuss. > > > > Maintainers/long time developers are burning out. At the same time there's > > frustration from new comers who have trouble getting their patches accepted. We > > have instances of arguments between longtime developers which leads to more > > frustration because it drags on the development process. > > I'm still working on the "Communicaton style" documents (one for > Maintainers to new contributors, and more importantly, one for new/existing > contributors on how to communicate to maintainers and what to expect.) > These documents will focus on looking at the POV of the other side. For the > how to talk to maintainers, it will discuss that maintainers have to make > sure their subsystems works for everyone, and not just for the new > contributor. > > But being a maintainer myself with a full-time job that is not to do my > maintainership, I'm struggling to find time to work on this :-p > > > > > I have argued for the last few years that maintainers should be taking a more > > active role in the social side of our development process. Be the grownups in > > the room and help mitigate these conflicts before they sour relationships. > > The "How to talk to contributors" document will try to address some of this. > > > > > But this just adds to the long list of things that maintainers already need to > > do. Oftentimes they are the only reviewers, testers, and main developers rolled > > into one. We have an increase of automated testing, which while is a net > > positive, adds to the stress of maintainers who view these reports as their > > personal responsibilty to address. > > > > We all work differently, so having big sweeping solutions is a non-starter. > > However I think there are things we can learn from eachother to encourage > > different thinking and thus result in a smoother development experience for all > > of us. > > I've been advocating in the TAB meetings for a "maintainer 'support > group'". Basically where stressed out maintainers can join to talk to other > stressed out maintainers and hopefully find a way to become less stressed > out. > > > > > Patch review: Obviously more people the better, encouraging review by trading > > reviews for having developers patches reviewed is a good method, but this only > > works for sufficiently large communities. > > > > Automated testing: This doesn't replace review, but it can help add confidence > > when you're accepting patch reviews from less experienced members. > > > > De-prioritize automated reports: Syzbot is great, but the failure cases can be > > sporadic and difficult to reproduce. Things that are bisected to a specific > > patch are obviously easy to tackle, but don't let yourself get overwhelmed by > > syzbot, they're good things to hand to new developers to cut their teeth on. > > I ignore pretty much any syzbot report that is not truly bisectable, as I've > spent too much time on them in the past to only find out that the bug is in > another subsystem. I won't totally ignore them. I do look at them to see if > it's obviously a bug in my subsystem, but if not, then it's ignored. > > > > > Maintainer groups, not sole maintainers: We all have things going on, build up > > people you trust and develop a way to spread the maintenance load. > > This goes along with my "support group" idea. > Agreed. Honestly a lot of what I've done has been born out of seeing what other projects do, so I feel it's a decent first step towards thinking differently about our roles as maintainers. We don't always stick our heads up and look around, so having somebody show up and say "I had this problem and this is how I solved it" will hopefully be a good first step towards solving some of these problems. This thread has sort of wandered off into the "how to do automation" weeds. I think that automation is a good solution for a subset of the problems that maintainers face, but it's not my main focus. My main focus is we have a good set of strategies for all of the different stresses and challenges we face, and then hopefully as a community we can converge on a set of best practices. Maintainership looks a lot different now than it did when I started, and it's been a change for the better IMO. But we're mostly all doing this for a living now, and we need to figure out how to make it more sustainable, and easier for us to onboard new maintainers. Thanks, Josef ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
* Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout 2023-08-17 15:33 ` Josef Bacik @ 2023-08-17 17:10 ` Rodrigo Vivi 0 siblings, 0 replies; 54+ messages in thread From: Rodrigo Vivi @ 2023-08-17 17:10 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josef Bacik; +Cc: Steven Rostedt, ksummit, James Bottomley On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 11:33:26AM -0400, Josef Bacik wrote: > On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 10:46:22AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > > On Wed, 16 Aug 2023 14:08:08 -0400 > > Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com> wrote: > > > > > Hello, > > > > FYI, James Bottomely posted a very similar topic: > > > > https://lore.kernel.org/all/ab9cfd857e32635f626a906410ad95877a22f0db.camel@HansenPartnership.com/ > > > > Oh good I didn't see this, James and I have similar views on this topic. Apparently we have yet another related with burnout: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230817153326.GA2934386@perftesting/raw > > > > > > > This is a topic we're beating to death but haven't really made decent progress > > > on WRT real solutions. I know I have advocated for adding even more > > > responsibilties to maintainers plates, which isn't really helpful. > > > > > > There is a lot in this email, so I suppose choose your own adventure when it > > > comes to what we think is relevant to discuss. > > > > > > Maintainers/long time developers are burning out. At the same time there's > > > frustration from new comers who have trouble getting their patches accepted. We > > > have instances of arguments between longtime developers which leads to more > > > frustration because it drags on the development process. > > > > I'm still working on the "Communicaton style" documents (one for > > Maintainers to new contributors, and more importantly, one for new/existing > > contributors on how to communicate to maintainers and what to expect.) > > These documents will focus on looking at the POV of the other side. For the > > how to talk to maintainers, it will discuss that maintainers have to make > > sure their subsystems works for everyone, and not just for the new > > contributor. > > > > But being a maintainer myself with a full-time job that is not to do my > > maintainership, I'm struggling to find time to work on this :-p > > > > > > > > I have argued for the last few years that maintainers should be taking a more > > > active role in the social side of our development process. Be the grownups in > > > the room and help mitigate these conflicts before they sour relationships. > > > > The "How to talk to contributors" document will try to address some of this. > > > > > > > > But this just adds to the long list of things that maintainers already need to > > > do. Oftentimes they are the only reviewers, testers, and main developers rolled > > > into one. We have an increase of automated testing, which while is a net > > > positive, adds to the stress of maintainers who view these reports as their > > > personal responsibilty to address. > > > > > > We all work differently, so having big sweeping solutions is a non-starter. > > > However I think there are things we can learn from eachother to encourage > > > different thinking and thus result in a smoother development experience for all > > > of us. > > > > I've been advocating in the TAB meetings for a "maintainer 'support > > group'". Basically where stressed out maintainers can join to talk to other > > stressed out maintainers and hopefully find a way to become less stressed > > out. > > > > > > > > Patch review: Obviously more people the better, encouraging review by trading > > > reviews for having developers patches reviewed is a good method, but this only > > > works for sufficiently large communities. > > > > > > Automated testing: This doesn't replace review, but it can help add confidence > > > when you're accepting patch reviews from less experienced members. > > > > > > De-prioritize automated reports: Syzbot is great, but the failure cases can be > > > sporadic and difficult to reproduce. Things that are bisected to a specific > > > patch are obviously easy to tackle, but don't let yourself get overwhelmed by > > > syzbot, they're good things to hand to new developers to cut their teeth on. > > > > I ignore pretty much any syzbot report that is not truly bisectable, as I've > > spent too much time on them in the past to only find out that the bug is in > > another subsystem. I won't totally ignore them. I do look at them to see if > > it's obviously a bug in my subsystem, but if not, then it's ignored. > > > > > > > > Maintainer groups, not sole maintainers: We all have things going on, build up > > > people you trust and develop a way to spread the maintenance load. > > > > This goes along with my "support group" idea. > > > > Agreed. Honestly a lot of what I've done has been born out of seeing what other > projects do, so I feel it's a decent first step towards thinking differently > about our roles as maintainers. We don't always stick our heads up and look > around, so having somebody show up and say "I had this problem and this is how I > solved it" will hopefully be a good first step towards solving some of these > problems. A group of co-maintainers you can trust and rotate is a good idea. Specially to distribute and rotate the manual cadenced pull requests. But also to spread the stress on our regular push-backs we need to perform every time. Well, we have this kind of setup in i915 and I believe it works pretty well for us. > > This thread has sort of wandered off into the "how to do automation" weeds. I > think that automation is a good solution for a subset of the problems that > maintainers face, but it's not my main focus. Indeed, but kind of yet on the automation lines you mentioned, it also comes the email and mechanics of getting patches merged. For that, and on top of having a group of maintainers, a possibility is a group of committers where you also trust. Of course, you still needs to pay attention to the CI results and to all the merged patches constantly, and specially before doing the pull requests. But this at least distributes a bit of the mechanics of getting patches merged burnout feeling you mentioned. Yet on this lines it comes the tools. b4 helps a lot. We also use patchwork, which also helps. But I also wonder if at some point we would be ready to discuss some interface tools like gitlab flows. > > My main focus is we have a good set of strategies for all of the different > stresses and challenges we face, and then hopefully as a community we can > converge on a set of best practices. Maintainership looks a lot different now > than it did when I started, and it's been a change for the better IMO. But > we're mostly all doing this for a living now, and we need to figure out how to > make it more sustainable, and easier for us to onboard new maintainers. Thanks, > > Josef ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 54+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2023-09-13 9:02 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 54+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2023-08-16 18:08 [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout Josef Bacik 2023-08-16 20:14 ` Luis Chamberlain 2023-08-17 9:39 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 12:36 ` Andrew Lunn 2023-08-17 15:19 ` Jakub Kicinski 2023-08-17 23:54 ` Alexei Starovoitov 2023-08-18 13:55 ` Linus Walleij 2023-08-18 15:09 ` Jakub Kicinski 2023-08-18 17:07 ` Linus Torvalds 2023-08-19 6:45 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-21 15:35 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-22 7:41 ` Jiri Kosina 2023-08-22 9:05 ` Hannes Reinecke 2023-08-22 10:13 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-22 11:25 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum 2023-08-22 4:07 ` Dave Airlie 2023-08-22 9:46 ` Jan Kara 2023-08-22 10:10 ` Christian Brauner 2023-08-22 10:20 ` Jan Kara 2023-08-22 11:29 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-22 11:05 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-22 11:32 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-22 13:47 ` Leon Romanovsky 2023-08-22 13:30 ` Jan Kara 2023-08-29 12:54 ` Steven Rostedt 2023-09-13 9:02 ` Dan Carpenter 2023-08-21 8:50 ` Daniel Vetter 2023-08-21 15:18 ` Jakub Kicinski 2023-08-22 4:12 ` Dave Airlie 2023-08-18 15:26 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 15:40 ` Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk 2023-08-18 18:36 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-21 16:13 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 16:10 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-21 16:04 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-24 21:30 ` Jonathan Cameron 2023-08-25 7:05 ` Krzysztof Kozlowski 2023-08-17 12:00 ` Jani Nikula 2023-08-17 12:17 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-17 12:42 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 13:56 ` Miguel Ojeda 2023-08-17 15:03 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-17 17:41 ` Miguel Ojeda 2023-08-18 15:30 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 16:23 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-18 17:17 ` Laurent Pinchart 2023-08-18 18:00 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Mark Brown 2023-08-17 14:22 ` Steven Rostedt 2023-08-17 15:31 ` Jani Nikula 2023-08-17 14:46 ` Steven Rostedt 2023-08-17 15:33 ` Josef Bacik 2023-08-17 17:10 ` Rodrigo Vivi
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