From: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>
To: Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org>
Cc: Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.de>, Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>,
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>,
Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>,
Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com>,
Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>,
Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>,
Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>,
ksummit@lists.linux.dev, Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>,
Song Liu <song@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:25:19 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20230822112519.GN10135@pendragon.ideasonboard.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20230822101311.GA6029@unreal>
On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 01:13:11PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 11:05:32AM +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> > On 8/22/23 09:41, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > > On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > >
> > > > > It is not clear to me how to get honest answers without fear of
> > > > > loosing an ability to work with that subsystems later.
> > > >
> > > > One straightforward (on paper) option is to guarantee anonymity. When I
> > > > was in university, students were given the opportunity to provide
> > > > feedback on teachers, and the feedback was aggregated into a report that
> > > > didn't contain any personal information that could be used to identify
> > > > the students.
> > >
> > > I understand where you are coming from with this (my university did the
> > > same :) ), but in my view this has a huge potential for not really
> > > reflecting reality. Rationale being: the people who e.g. got their code
> > > rejected will naturally tend to provide negative feedback, even if
> > > rejecting the code was objectively the right thing to do.
> > >
> > > And vice versa.
> > >
> > I do see the advantage, but the main disadvantage here is that it's eroding
> > trust between people. Anonymous review tends to be used for
> > negative feedback, and I am aware that negative feedback to maintainers
> > can have a direct impact on your ability to work in that subsystem
> > (and believe me, I have been in that position. Several times.)
> > But in the end if you want to continue to work in that subsystem
> > you have to come to some sort of arrangement here.
> > I do believe that our maintainers are capable of differentiating
> > between personal and technical issues, so it should be possible
> > to work together despite personal ... (issues? differences?).
> >
> > But none of the above will work if the feedback is anonymously.
> > Maintainer will have a reason for reacting that way, and won't
> > be able to explain themselves properly if they don't know whom
> > to address.
>
> I don't think that it is possible to provide feedback purely
> anonymously, as subsystems has pretty stable number of contributors
> and the feedback that they will provide will allow identify them
> relatively easy by savvy maintainer.
Usually, feedback is anonymized by gathering information from multiple
sources, and compiling it in a way that underlines the main points
instead of focussing on particular personal stories. The process can
also filter out non-constructive feedback. For instance, if multiple
replies to the survey mention a very large time to get patches reviewed,
that's something that can be part of an anonymized report. This however
requires a large enough pool of developers to submit feedback, so it may
not work well in some cases.
--
Regards,
Laurent Pinchart
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-08-22 11:25 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 54+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-08-16 18:08 [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout Josef Bacik
2023-08-16 20:14 ` Luis Chamberlain
2023-08-17 9:39 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-17 12:36 ` Andrew Lunn
2023-08-17 15:19 ` Jakub Kicinski
2023-08-17 23:54 ` Alexei Starovoitov
2023-08-18 13:55 ` Linus Walleij
2023-08-18 15:09 ` Jakub Kicinski
2023-08-18 17:07 ` Linus Torvalds
2023-08-19 6:45 ` Leon Romanovsky
2023-08-21 15:35 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-22 7:41 ` Jiri Kosina
2023-08-22 9:05 ` Hannes Reinecke
2023-08-22 10:13 ` Leon Romanovsky
2023-08-22 11:25 ` Laurent Pinchart [this message]
2023-08-21 19:23 ` Vegard Nossum
2023-08-22 4:07 ` Dave Airlie
2023-08-22 9:46 ` Jan Kara
2023-08-22 10:10 ` Christian Brauner
2023-08-22 10:20 ` Jan Kara
2023-08-22 11:29 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-22 11:05 ` Leon Romanovsky
2023-08-22 11:32 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-22 13:47 ` Leon Romanovsky
2023-08-22 13:30 ` Jan Kara
2023-08-29 12:54 ` Steven Rostedt
2023-09-13 9:02 ` Dan Carpenter
2023-08-21 8:50 ` Daniel Vetter
2023-08-21 15:18 ` Jakub Kicinski
2023-08-22 4:12 ` Dave Airlie
2023-08-18 15:26 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-18 15:40 ` Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk
2023-08-18 18:36 ` Mark Brown
2023-08-21 16:13 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-18 16:10 ` Mark Brown
2023-08-21 16:04 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-24 21:30 ` Jonathan Cameron
2023-08-25 7:05 ` Krzysztof Kozlowski
2023-08-17 12:00 ` Jani Nikula
2023-08-17 12:17 ` Mark Brown
2023-08-17 12:42 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-17 13:56 ` Miguel Ojeda
2023-08-17 15:03 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-17 17:41 ` Miguel Ojeda
2023-08-18 15:30 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-18 16:23 ` Mark Brown
2023-08-18 17:17 ` Laurent Pinchart
2023-08-18 18:00 ` Mark Brown
2023-08-17 14:46 ` Mark Brown
2023-08-17 14:22 ` Steven Rostedt
2023-08-17 15:31 ` Jani Nikula
2023-08-17 14:46 ` Steven Rostedt
2023-08-17 15:33 ` Josef Bacik
2023-08-17 17:10 ` Rodrigo Vivi
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