Re: [Ksummit-discuss] "Maintainer summit" invitation discussion

[Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 9:55 PM, James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> Isn't it easy?  The Maintainers summit is going to be part of a larger
> kernel track within LinuxCon EU  (not that everyone plans on staying
> on, of course, but several will be).  Just put the bitch at Maintainers
> session in that as a round table, so any attendee of LinuxCon EU can
> come and complain if they want to.

I don't think it's that easy. I guess due to the "interesting" stuff
we're doing in drm I get to hear some of the frustration stories from
leaf contributors. Picking a conference means you exclude folks who
won't go there (and Linux is so huge that there's simply no single
conference that would cover it all), but more important a common theme
I'm hearing is that frustrated folks don't want to speak up in public,
because if they piss of their maintainer, their problems just get
worse. On the other hand they lack the power and influence to fix
anything, so there's very little upside to speaking up about issues.
The usual solution seems to eventually just quietly abandon upstream,
or at least the particular subsystem.

The other thing is that because Linuxcon has such a wide audience you
might just get the peanut gallery kernel bashing from bystanders, not
feedback from actual (or at least potential) contributors.

Still worth trying I guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's not
much coming out of such a feedback session.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch