From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: NeilBrown Subject: WANTED new maintainer for Linux/md (and mdadm) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2015 17:10:06 +1100 Message-ID: <87k2o849j5.fsf@notabene.neil.brown.name> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="=-=-="; micalg=pgp-sha256; protocol="application/pgp-signature" Return-path: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org, dm-devel@redhat.com, LKML Cc: Linus Torvalds , "J. Bruce Fields" , Phil Turmel List-Id: linux-raid.ids --=-=-= Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable hi, I became maintainer for md (Linux Software RAID) in late 2001 and on the whole it has been fun and a valuable experience. But I have been losing interest in recent years (https://lwn.net/Articles/511073/) and as was mentioned at the kernel summit, I would like to resign. Some years ago I managed to hand over nfsd to the excellent Bruce Fields, but I do not seem to have the gift that Linus has of attracting maintainers. While there are a number of people who know quite a bit about md and/or have contributed to development, there is no obvious candidate for replacement maintainer - no one who has already been doing significant parts of the maintainer role. So I have decided to fall back on the mechanism by which I ended up being maintainer in the first place. I will create a vacuum and hope someone fills it (yes: I was sucked-in....). So as of 1st February 2016 I will be resigning. At the kernel summit in October Linus talked about the value of maintainership teams (https://lwn.net/Articles/662979/). I think it would be great if a (small) team formed to continue to oversee md rather than just a single individual (or maybe the dm team could extend to include md??). If I had managed to be part of a team rather than "going it alone" for so long, I might feel less tired of the whole thing now. I don't see it as my place to appoint that team or any individuals, or even to nominate any candidates. A very important attribute of a maintainer is that they need to care about the code and the subsystem and I cannot tell other people to care (or even know if they do). It is really up to individuals to volunteer. A few people have been mentioned to me in earlier less-public conversations. Any of them may well be suitable, but I would rather they named themselves if interested. So I'm hoping to get one or more volunteers to be maintainer: - to gather and manage patches and outstanding issues, - to review patches or get them reviewed - to follow up bug reports and get them resolved - to feed patches upstream, maybe directly to Linus, maybe through some other maintainer, depending on what relationships already exist or can be formed, - to guide the longer term direction (saying "no" is important sometimes), - to care, but also to be aware that maintainership takes real effort and time, as does anything that is really worthwhile. This all applies to mdadm as well as md (except you would ultimately *be* upstream for mdadm, not needing to send it anywhere). Even if a clear team doesn't form it would be great if different people maintained mdadm and md. One part of the job that I have put a lot of time in to is following the linux-raid@vger.kernel.org list and providing support. This makes people feel good about md and so more adventurous in using it. Consequently I tend to hear about bugs and usability issues nice and early (well before paying customers hit them in most cases) and that is a big win. In recent times I've been doing less of this and have been absolutely thrilled that the gap has been more than filled by other very competent community members. Not developers particular but a number of md users have been providing excellent support. I'd particularly like to high-light Phil Turmel who is very forthcoming with excellent advice, but he is certainly not the only one who deserves a lot of thanks. So "Thank you" to everyone who answers questions on linux-raid. This would be a good place for any future maintainer to hang out to receive wisdom as well as to provide support. I will still be around. I can certainly help out in some sort of mentor role, and can probably be convinced to review patches and comment on designs. But I really want to head towards spending less time on md (there are so many other interesting things to learn about). So: if anyone is interested - please announce yourself, ask questions and start doing things. I have no clear idea about how a transition will happen. That is really up to you (plural). Take the bull by the horns and start *being* a maintainer(team). I won't get in your way and I'll help where I can. Thanks, NeilBrown P.S. I'm committed to continue to work with the raid5-journal effort From=20Facebook and the raid1-cluster effort from SUSE and the line-in-the-sand of 1st February won't affect my support for those. --=-=-= Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJWd5e+AAoJEDnsnt1WYoG5rQwQAL8gu5I/PrEXqtHtItSiPaKN 1d8mZ+4bG22fJVmJXY1Xqb3aB4oGT15AMwaBgfdS2PXfl5o/NyhUb4teEW4KWwga k0oFrZ682pQ/RkZd60aGlCojIm1bs6eUgmlh6cbEigKZHoiCivDOaOPtxzELBW2c 7NrcPD6797KX4f40+NN5qemSa1Tq5YtlWoTlXHrJe9Grd0dpD/JO5Eu+q5OpMHXp WvEmDHxZyPis0G+0x1WY1JJxz0R5hERkatmjhvtFfwjs/0aepEXw8f/whSn29/24 TCF/EVYbUTtcU3NnODcxVKQds0b6ZU+nxfAAPvQAZ4hLPdt613BkbHPwvc0pbBku hrQZ301VdWnay2QE45Sj37w1hPyn2oMqu3TvGBbzsvJQeyb8TA/8h9F0SHY7CA7b E5kQwet24+9o7Jc7MEdAIN9txnyXGdm6x53TVxg7lZtRZFx7DtYDFQALYejgBPzg Trskt+JJJsPsVo5f8BFPQ89zxf5patCN9ZdZ7ku6/U+vPNMc4jFBLP4/axIXasFI S+dOedTtc/ENTroWUu7K0xdMrwNA98gVHHFeQPU/nx+IJOskf7UqllX9w9XzCqNN +X375AkNhYPbVx0v2343wpMk9lePn+OT1CN89eDNDKJWyVb6uYJ03lmv8gdC5mBo w9oCYVxWWx3j9KUB9yqS =aePQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=-=-=-- From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751548AbbLUGLA (ORCPT ); Mon, 21 Dec 2015 01:11:00 -0500 Received: from mx2.suse.de ([195.135.220.15]:47946 "EHLO mx2.suse.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751415AbbLUGKR (ORCPT ); Mon, 21 Dec 2015 01:10:17 -0500 X-Amavis-Alert: BAD HEADER SECTION, Header field occurs more than once: "Cc" occurs 3 times From: NeilBrown To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org, dm-devel@redhat.com, LKML Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2015 17:10:06 +1100 Cc: Linus Torvalds Cc: "J. Bruce Fields" Subject: WANTED new maintainer for Linux/md (and mdadm) User-Agent: Notmuch/0.20.2 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/24.5.1 (x86_64-suse-linux-gnu) cc: Phil Turmel Message-ID: <87k2o849j5.fsf@notabene.neil.brown.name> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="=-=-="; micalg=pgp-sha256; protocol="application/pgp-signature" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org --=-=-= Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable hi, I became maintainer for md (Linux Software RAID) in late 2001 and on the whole it has been fun and a valuable experience. But I have been losing interest in recent years (https://lwn.net/Articles/511073/) and as was mentioned at the kernel summit, I would like to resign. Some years ago I managed to hand over nfsd to the excellent Bruce Fields, but I do not seem to have the gift that Linus has of attracting maintainers. While there are a number of people who know quite a bit about md and/or have contributed to development, there is no obvious candidate for replacement maintainer - no one who has already been doing significant parts of the maintainer role. So I have decided to fall back on the mechanism by which I ended up being maintainer in the first place. I will create a vacuum and hope someone fills it (yes: I was sucked-in....). So as of 1st February 2016 I will be resigning. At the kernel summit in October Linus talked about the value of maintainership teams (https://lwn.net/Articles/662979/). I think it would be great if a (small) team formed to continue to oversee md rather than just a single individual (or maybe the dm team could extend to include md??). If I had managed to be part of a team rather than "going it alone" for so long, I might feel less tired of the whole thing now. I don't see it as my place to appoint that team or any individuals, or even to nominate any candidates. A very important attribute of a maintainer is that they need to care about the code and the subsystem and I cannot tell other people to care (or even know if they do). It is really up to individuals to volunteer. A few people have been mentioned to me in earlier less-public conversations. Any of them may well be suitable, but I would rather they named themselves if interested. So I'm hoping to get one or more volunteers to be maintainer: - to gather and manage patches and outstanding issues, - to review patches or get them reviewed - to follow up bug reports and get them resolved - to feed patches upstream, maybe directly to Linus, maybe through some other maintainer, depending on what relationships already exist or can be formed, - to guide the longer term direction (saying "no" is important sometimes), - to care, but also to be aware that maintainership takes real effort and time, as does anything that is really worthwhile. This all applies to mdadm as well as md (except you would ultimately *be* upstream for mdadm, not needing to send it anywhere). Even if a clear team doesn't form it would be great if different people maintained mdadm and md. One part of the job that I have put a lot of time in to is following the linux-raid@vger.kernel.org list and providing support. This makes people feel good about md and so more adventurous in using it. Consequently I tend to hear about bugs and usability issues nice and early (well before paying customers hit them in most cases) and that is a big win. In recent times I've been doing less of this and have been absolutely thrilled that the gap has been more than filled by other very competent community members. Not developers particular but a number of md users have been providing excellent support. I'd particularly like to high-light Phil Turmel who is very forthcoming with excellent advice, but he is certainly not the only one who deserves a lot of thanks. So "Thank you" to everyone who answers questions on linux-raid. This would be a good place for any future maintainer to hang out to receive wisdom as well as to provide support. I will still be around. I can certainly help out in some sort of mentor role, and can probably be convinced to review patches and comment on designs. But I really want to head towards spending less time on md (there are so many other interesting things to learn about). So: if anyone is interested - please announce yourself, ask questions and start doing things. I have no clear idea about how a transition will happen. That is really up to you (plural). Take the bull by the horns and start *being* a maintainer(team). I won't get in your way and I'll help where I can. Thanks, NeilBrown P.S. I'm committed to continue to work with the raid5-journal effort From=20Facebook and the raid1-cluster effort from SUSE and the line-in-the-sand of 1st February won't affect my support for those. --=-=-= Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJWd5e+AAoJEDnsnt1WYoG5rQwQAL8gu5I/PrEXqtHtItSiPaKN 1d8mZ+4bG22fJVmJXY1Xqb3aB4oGT15AMwaBgfdS2PXfl5o/NyhUb4teEW4KWwga k0oFrZ682pQ/RkZd60aGlCojIm1bs6eUgmlh6cbEigKZHoiCivDOaOPtxzELBW2c 7NrcPD6797KX4f40+NN5qemSa1Tq5YtlWoTlXHrJe9Grd0dpD/JO5Eu+q5OpMHXp WvEmDHxZyPis0G+0x1WY1JJxz0R5hERkatmjhvtFfwjs/0aepEXw8f/whSn29/24 TCF/EVYbUTtcU3NnODcxVKQds0b6ZU+nxfAAPvQAZ4hLPdt613BkbHPwvc0pbBku hrQZ301VdWnay2QE45Sj37w1hPyn2oMqu3TvGBbzsvJQeyb8TA/8h9F0SHY7CA7b E5kQwet24+9o7Jc7MEdAIN9txnyXGdm6x53TVxg7lZtRZFx7DtYDFQALYejgBPzg Trskt+JJJsPsVo5f8BFPQ89zxf5patCN9ZdZ7ku6/U+vPNMc4jFBLP4/axIXasFI S+dOedTtc/ENTroWUu7K0xdMrwNA98gVHHFeQPU/nx+IJOskf7UqllX9w9XzCqNN +X375AkNhYPbVx0v2343wpMk9lePn+OT1CN89eDNDKJWyVb6uYJ03lmv8gdC5mBo w9oCYVxWWx3j9KUB9yqS =aePQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=-=-=--