From: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
To: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>
Cc: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>,
Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com>,
Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>, 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: Fri, 18 Aug 2023 11:40:32 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <ZN-Q8AsMwaQ4JMP4@char.us.oracle.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20230818152629.GA13558@pendragon.ideasonboard.com>
On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 06:26:29PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:
> > Alexei, thanks for returning the conversation
> > to this very important topic.
> >
> > On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 1:55 AM Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
> >
> > > BPF has solid CI that helps a lot, but the maintainer burnout is acutely felt.
> > > The main reason for burnout is patch flood.
> >
> > I agree this is an important cause.
> > Even worse is any kind of social conflict or bad mood in the community.
> > Science has studied stress, what we mostly run into is called "microstress".
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_stress
> >
> > > The maintainer's day looks like non-stop code review.
> > > The patch backlog just doesn't end.
> >
> > I've been there too :(
>
> I think most of us know the feeling. Personally, if my workload reaches
> 100% review for an extended period of time, without having any time for
> "fun" activities such as hacking, I'm pretty sure my review efficiency
> drops drastically. Maybe that's call burn out.
>
> > > We're trying to encourage active developers to be code reviewers as well
> > > via positive/negative scores:
> > > https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/ZJx8sBW%2FQPOBswNF@google.com/
> > >
> > > It doesn't help much yet. All incoming kernel contributors assume
> > > that it's a maintainer's job to do code reviews.
> > > Developers just send patches and wait. It doesn't occur to them that
> > > reviewing other patches will help them land their own.
> >
> > The DRI/DRM community has group maintainership that works a little
> > bit.
> > Essentially it boils down to ask people to review your stuff and you
> > will review and also merge their stuff in return.
> > Sometimes this works.
> > Especially if you are a circle of acquaintances working full
> > time on similar things, yay! So much support.
> > When you are a sporadic contributor it doesn't work as well.
> > Because you cannot always find some matching contribution to
> > review and you feel like begging.
> > So different solutions for different contributors may be needed.
>
> I've also experienced mixed results from "trading reviews". It's
> certainly nice on paper, and it works sometimes, especially when asking
> contributors to review patches that are directly related to their
> business interest. I remember asking a contributor from a large company
> to help me with reviews, to free some of my time to review their
> patches. The contributor helped with reviewing third-party contributions
> to the driver they're actively working on. When I asked for help
> reviewing an entirely separate driver that their employer had no
> business interest in, however, I faced the "we're busy and don't have
> time" argument.
>
> Maybe part of the solution here, to share the maintenance burden, is to
> expect contributors, especially the ones with large financial resources,
> to spent a certain percentage of their time reviewing code that is in
> their area of expertise but not in their area of business interest.
May I add an point that I had struggled in the past with (and it could
be very well this is not an issue in your subsystem in which case please
ignore it):
This idea assumes you trust them to have the same level of expertise
that you have.
That is say they do a review but miss the more esoteric semantics (say
hardware quirks that are documented but only for folks that *grok* the
hardware). You may know it, but they don't. You accept their patches and
months later it all blows up. You are unhappy, Linus is screaming about
it. Burn-out ++.
Perhaps the question should be: How to grow the community so that members
collectively have the same knowledge as you?
(And then you can take days off without feeling guily. Burn-out --).
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-08-18 17:14 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
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 [this message]
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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