Guys, The discussion we had on the Tuesday meeting about the maintainers file got me thinking.
I think there are two problems with the current model. - It puts a high burden on the committers, since at least one among the committer set has to know every piece of the code. Aka. it doesn't scale very well. - It doesn't allow the code authors aka maintainers of a given component any control of changes to 'their' component. Proposal: 1) Each component has a set of owners (or named list). 2) When a change is submitted. A gerrit hook processes the list of changed files, and automatically adds the component owner lists or individuals to the reviews list. (e.g. Ole Troan (vnet/map), Neale Ranns (vnet/ip)) 3) A committer will then see when maintainers have +1 for each affected component. And then either submit or chase component owners for review. A maintainer can then raise a "discuss" by a -1. If there is support for this we need to: - create maintainer file (and keep this up to date) - write gerrit hook Btw, Damjan pointed me to the Xen project's definition of maintainers vs committers: ---- Maintainers Maintainers own one or several components in the Xen tree. A maintainer reviews and approves changes that affect their components. It is a maintainer's prime responsibility to review, comment on, co-ordinate and accept patches from other community member's and to maintain the design cohesion of their components. Maintainers are listed in a MAINTAINERS file in the root of the source tree. Committers Committers are Maintainers that are allowed to commit changes into the source code repository. The committer acts on the wishes of the maintainers and applies changes that have been approved by the respective maintainer(s) to the source tree. Due to their status in the community, committers can also act as referees should disagreements amongst maintainers arise. Committers are listed on the sub-project's team portal (e.g. Hypervisor team portal). ---- Views? Best regards, Ole _______________________________________________ vpp-dev mailing list vpp-dev@lists.fd.io https://lists.fd.io/mailman/listinfo/vpp-dev