From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.35]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 3D08F94F for ; Wed, 19 Apr 2017 19:40:49 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-io0-f170.google.com (mail-io0-f170.google.com [209.85.223.170]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 8F4C528B for ; Wed, 19 Apr 2017 19:40:48 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mail-io0-f170.google.com with SMTP id k87so34433339ioi.0 for ; Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:40:48 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: linus971@gmail.com In-Reply-To: <20188905.kHbMkj7sB6@avalon> References: <20188905.kHbMkj7sB6@avalon> From: Linus Torvalds Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:40:47 -0700 Message-ID: To: Laurent Pinchart Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Cc: ksummit , Greg Kroah-Hartman , David Miller , Dave Airlie , Doug Ledford , Ingo Molnar Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] "Maintainer summit" invitation discussion List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 12:25 PM, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > Agreed, for a maintainer summit to be useful, we need to have multiple sides > present. Gathering core maintainers with key representatives of the downstream > communities around the table is great, but I think we would be missing one > category whose opinion is equally important: kernel developers. > > When everything goes well developers can be represented by their maintainers. > That's the case where the process flows smoothly, so there isn't likely to be > much to discuss. However, problems occurring in the maintenance process are > likely to result in, if not conflicts, at least different views between > maintainers and developers, in which case developers won't be represented at > the summit. > > I'm not sure how to handle that. I certainly don't want to increase the number > of attendees to include key representatives of developers (and while I'd be > very curious to see how they would be selected, I doubt it would work in > practice), but I also believe we need to address this class of maintainership > issues. I do agree that it would be a great thing to have a "bitch at maintainers" session where developers get to vent frustration at how their patches are (or are _not_) accepted by maintainers. I know we've had issues in the VFS layer, with Al sometimes effectively dropping off the intenet for a time, for example. And I'm sure it happens elsewhere too, I'm just aware of the VFS side because it's one of the areas where I end up personally being a secondary maintainer. But the problem with that "bitch at maintainers" thing is that I can't for the life of me come up with a sane small set of people to do that. So I don't see it happening ;( Anyway, I have tried to gather "other groups" that aren't in that top-10 maintainers list, but are examples of people "around" the maintenance issues: - stable and linux-next: Ben Hutchings (stable) Stephen Rothwell (linux-next) - Infrastructure: Konstantin Ryabitsev (k.org) Fengguang Wu (kernel test robot) Steven Rostedt (ktest) Shuah Khan (tools/testing) Thorsten Leemhuis (regression tracking) Jonathan Corbet (documentation) - Security: Andy Lutomirski (security and core) Kees Cook (security) James Morris (security subsystem) - distro people: Laura Abbott (Fedora) Jiri Kosina (MM? JM?) (Suse) Rom Lemarchand (Android) - Hw vendor people? - Sponsor people? but I can't come up with a sane set of "leaf developers" or anything like that. We've just got too many. That's obviously a good problem to have, but it doesn't fit with the maintainer summit, because unless somebody can come up with some kind of prototypical spokesperson for that group (and to me, that doesn't seem likely), I don't see how to do it. (And I still suspect that we do want coverage of some remaining maintainership areas, ie filesystem and block layer, because the "top-10 maintainers" don't cover that at all. And I haven't heard suggestions for the networking side either, still assuming that Daem isn't interested since he never has been before..) Linus