On 04/17/2013 01:23:28 PM, Sarah Sharp wrote:
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 09:15:06PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> On 04/15/2013 12:33:34 PM, Sarah Sharp wrote:
> >Outline how often it's polite to ping kernel maintainers about
> >bugs, and
> >suggest that kernel maintainers should respond to bugs in 1 to 5
> >business days.
>
> Is there anything in here about the four-level nature of modern
> maintainership?
>
> Patches go from the developer, to the maintainer, to one of Linus's
> lieutenants, to Linus himself. If you submit a patch to a maintainer
> they owe you a response. The lieutenant (subsystem maintainer) owes
> that maintainer a response, and Linus (the project's architect) owes
> the lieutenant a response.
Do we want to go into this much detail in a document meant for
frustrated bug reporters? Or perhaps we should create a separate
document about the kernel maintainer hierarchy and reference it here?
My point was that you have to contact the right person to semi-reliably
get a response, but you're right. That's more about getting patches in
than getting problems reproduced and diagnosed.
Also, please note that I'm writing this from the perspective of a
driver
maintainer. I'm not sure if we've met face to face. :)
Pretty sure we haven't. (You helped me debug a weird usb3 issue once
via email.)
> Linus does not owe you, personally, a response. Neither do the
> subsystem maintainers if you approach them directly with something
> that should have gone through one of the hundreds of domain-specific
> maintainers out of the Maintainers file. So the point of going to
> the right people in sequence and getting their review and
> signed-off-by lines is to ensure you don't sit there listening to
> crickets chirping while your patch is ignored. (If you approach
> Linus directly you may randomly _get_ a response, but there's no
> guarantee, and usually you won't because he's really busy.)
This file is about bug reporting, not submitting patches. I rewrote
...
TLDR version: Yes, it would be nice if bug reporters could go up the
hierarchy, but they don't have an easy way to know which subsystem
maintainers to contact. Perhaps a new line in MAINTAINERS for the
subsystem maintainer would be helpful?
Eh, this has gone undocumented for a full decade and nobody but me's
cared. It seemed related at the time (general interacting with the
kernel developers), but I guess not.
Rob--
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