Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] Maintainer Handbook: Subsystem Profile

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Sun Nov 25 2018 - 05:58:11 EST


On Wed 2018-11-14 20:53:13, Dan Williams wrote:
> At a recently concluded session at the Linux Plumbers Conference I
> proposed a "Subsystem Profile" as a document that a maintainer can
> provide to set contributor expectations and provide fodder for a
> discussion between maintainers about the merits of different maintainer
> policies.
>
> For those that did not attend, the goal of the Subsystem Profile, and the
> Maintainer Handbook more generally, is to provide a desk reference for
> maintainers both new and experienced. The session introduction was:
>
> The first rule of kernel maintenance is that there are no hard and
> fast rules. That state of affairs is both a blessing and a curse. It
> has served the community well to be adaptable to the different
> people and different problem spaces that inhabit the kernel
> community. However, that variability also leads to inconsistent
> experiences for contributors, little to no guidance for new
> contributors, and unnecessary stress on current maintainers. There
> are quite a few of people who have been around long enough to make
> enough mistakes that they have gained some hard earned proficiency.
> However if the kernel community expects to keep growing it needs to
> be able both scale the maintainers it has and ramp new ones without
> necessarily let them make a decades worth of mistakes to learn the
> ropes.
>
> To be clear, the proposed document does not impose or suggest new
> rules. Instead it provides an outlet to document the unwritten rules
> and policies in effect for each subsystem, and that each subsystem
> might decide differently for whatever reason.

Sounds like a new rules to me :-(, making submitting simple patches
harder.

It would be good if the rules were similar / same accross the
subsystems, documenting "it is okay to be different" is not really helpful.


Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature