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

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.