[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] The role of maintainers wrt technical and personal disagreements

Hello,

A topic we talked about a fair bit during LSFMM both in sessions and in the
hallway was what we expect from our maintainers.  Historically this has been a
lot of things, merge, review, and test patches.  Send patches to Linus, get
yelled at when the testing was insufficient.  Attempt to wrangle the children
playing in your sandbox.  Maintainer is the catch all developer for subsystems,
and this leads to a variety of problems, like burnout or simply inactive
maintainers.

Additionally there's a common attitude of letting developers fight it out to
figure out the best way forward on a contentious topic.  I can think of a few
major reworks or features in the last few years where things got pretty heated
between a few developers.  And not new developers either, these are well
experienced community members.  I understand the argument that we want to let
developers figure out the best way forward amongst themselves, however it
doesn't help if relationships are destroyed to the point that people can't be in
the same room with each other.  I would like to see us move more towards
maintainers, or even just technical leaders in the area, stepping in and setting
the direction when there is conflict.  Oftentimes a third party can find a good
compromise and a path forward that keeps everybody from killing each other, and
keeps progress moving.

There's a lot of automation that we could build around the mechanical things
that maintainers do to offload them and give them more time to devote to the
soft skills of maintaining a subsystem.  Thanks,

Josef
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