Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Time to call it quits for the maintainer summit?

> > > If your assumption is correct, this is internal cat herding ... MM has
> > > much the same problem except that it has to deal with somewhat
> > > opinionated architecture maintainers (around 22 of them) to agree on
> > > the internal abstractions for MM primitives.  Perhaps rather than
> > > getting into my problem is bigger than yours type arguments, we could
> > > observe that MM might run a bit more smoothly because it gets an
> > > additional 3 day conference (LSF/MM) plus a MC at Plumbers to sort
> > > itself out?
>
> > I guess the question is, what exactly is being big for DRM that it needs to do
> > cherry-picking for their linux-next branch whereas Networking and ARM do
> > not? Is DRM bigger than either of those? From what I understand VFS doesn't
> > have to do that either. And VFS has a large range of file systems to deal
> > with. But it also has one of the best abstraction layers of the kernel.
>
> It's not even all of DRM, it's specifically the AMD and Intel driver
> stacks which as far as I can tell just routinely cherry pick all their
> fixes between their development and fixes branches without even
> considering the possibility of either merging up the fixes branch or
> just waiting and letting the fixes propagate back.  None of the rest of
> the DRM trees ever seems to cause these issues.

AMD and Intel are just the two largest teams with the longest
pipelines of internal engineers and teams. There are between 50 and
100 people in those groups, across multiple disjoint teams feeding
into a single driver. It just doesn't scale for all 50-100 people to
understand the cycle of the upstream Linus tree at all times for all
patches.

Which means for CI reasons and pipeline reasons, things go into -next
is the default, our -next trees are always open, and get disconnected
from upstream next from rc6->rc1 so not to mess things up.

Then there are people who understand the upstream cycle dealing with
fixes, because they know what goes into rc2 isn't what goes into rc4
isn't what goes into rc7, and that knowledge is hard to disseminate.
Having fixes be a free for all has usually meant me refusing trees in
rc6/rc7 because there are inappropriate patches for that time of the
cycle.

Dave.