Hi all, I've already chatted with some of you in private, here's the entire idea with a bit more thought. My motiviation for group maintainership of drm-misc was that I got a bit a guilty feeling the last few vacations/conferences when folks pinged about reviewed/tested pretty patches not landing. But also just increasing the bus factor and sharing the load better is good. And finally a shared misc drm tree would allow fringe drivers to get faster into Dave's drm-next by piggy-packing on top of the one pull request train. And it would also reduce a bit tree proliferation (at one point we had drm-misc/-bridge/-panel/-trivial and may more even). And at least everyone I chatted with seems to like the idea in principle. But what's still open is how to do it exactly. One big change with group maintainership is that you can't rebase a tree anymore. And right now I need to rebase drm-misc fairly often to throw out bad apples again. I think solving that is the important bit to make a shared drm-misc work. A few ideas: - I think CI is super-important. We're starting to finally roll that out for real for i915, and it's catching an awful lot of stuff already. Not yet ready for prime-time on public mailing lists, and for misc we probably can't test every patch before they land like we do for i915. But CI should have veto power before a pull request goes to Dave imo. For non-i915 Daniel Stone and others are working on ARM CI using the generic igt testcases for kms. And I'm open to merging driver-specific tests into igt too, if it makes sense, and e.g. Eric has already pushed some vc4 tests. - Stuff needs to at least compile cleanly before pushing. I've been really bad at that wrt arm drivers with my own drm-misc, but turns out it's fairly easy to get this right: http://blog.ffwll.ch/2016/02/arm-kernel-cross-compiling.html - Bad apples need to be kicked out with reverts, not rebases. I think that's fine for simple patches, and hence those can go directly to drm-misc. But a bunch of subsystem-wide refactorings go in through mis trees, and for those constantly mass-reverting until it's all solid is silly. And ime you need some soak time in a shared tree to iron out bugs with those kind of endeavours. We can address that with ad-hoc&short-lived topic branches which are then again owned by a single maintainer, but automatically pulled into an integration tree. After some soaking time to give CI systems time to crunch through those topic branches can then be merged into the main drm-misc and removed. - Also we can't roll forward to latest drm-next easily with rebases any more. So that needs to happen either right after the pull request lands (when no patch has been merged meanwhile). Or with backmerges, which then need a short commit message as to way the backmerge is needed ("Backmerge because we need $feature" is what I usually type), plus sob line from the committer. And of course the backmerged treed must be stable/non-rebasing and preferrably the backmerge should be a release/pull-request tag. - For tooling I suggest we just go with drm-intel maintainer-tools for a start. Picking dim has a few reasons: * Well tested, documented and fairly complete (includes e.g. bash-completion). * Integrated support for topic branches, including support for git worktree. * Well-exercised and robust integration tree support. Short-term we could add some convenience functions (e.g. for creating/merging drm-misc topic branches). Long-term we might or might not want to have this separated from drm-intel - that should be possible but a bit of work. Also, this way drm-misc would stay at it's current location while we figure things out. Longer term we might also want to look into adding other big drivers into an over drm integration. Of course group maintainership needs an initial group. My experience from drm-intel is that a bigger group of maintainer has benefits: It's clear that part-time maintaining is ok too, with maintainers focusing on their area of interest/expertise and only helping out in other places when there's a gap (due to e.g. vacations). Anyway, here's my thoughts for the starting group: Archit, Jani, Thierry & me as existing maintainers of drm-misc/bridge/panel, Alex&Rob as maintainers of big drivers and engaged in core drm stuff, Daniel Stone so that he has no more excuses to stall on arm drm ci. I think if this goes well we can extend it to more driver maintainers, e.g. Patrick would like to just push gma500 patches to some tree and not fiddle with pull requests all the time himself. Thoughts? Glaring ommisssions? Other topics we should discuss before we get started? Should we do a MAINTAINERS change right away, or leave things as-is until we're confident this will work and makes sense? Cheers, Daniel -- Daniel Vetter Software Engineer, Intel Corporation +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
