On Wed, 28 Oct 2015, Javier Martinez Canillas wrote:

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 1:14 PM, Lee Jones [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 28 Oct 2015, Lee Jones wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 28 Oct 2015, Javier Martinez Canillas wrote:

quoted

Hello Joe,

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Joe Perches [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 2015-10-28 at 11:53 +0100, Javier Martinez Canillas wrote:

quoted

(Lee) think(s) that the difference between a maintainer and
a reviewer is if a branch with fixes / new features are kept and pull
requests sent while I think that the difference is the level of
involvement someone has with a driver regardless of how patches ends
in the subsystem tree (picked directly by subsystem maintainers or
sent through pull requests).

Is the first time I heard your definition but maybe I'm the one that
is wrong so it would be great to get a consensus on that and get it
documented somewhere.

I think Lee is over-analyzing.

From MAINTAINERS:
        M: Mail patches to: FullName <address@domain>
        R: Designated reviewer: FullName <address@domain>
           These reviewers should be CCed on patches.
        S: Status, one of the following:
           Supported:   Someone is actually paid to look after this.
           Maintained:  Someone actually looks after it.

"looking after" doesn't mean upstreaming.

Agreed and upstreaming doesn't mean sending pull request, you can for
example upstream the downstream changes for a driver you maintain by
posting patches or ack patches others post and let the subsystem
maintainer to pick those (even if you are listed as the driver
maintainer in MAINTAINERS).

So by following Lee's definition, then most drivers' maintainers
should not be called maintainers since keeping a tree with patches for
both fixes and new features, sending pull requests, etc is only
justified for drivers that have a lot of changes per release. Is not
worth it for drivers that are in "maintenance mode" where only bugs
are fixed every once in a while or features are seldom added.

Exactly right.

Although, it looks like M: doesn't even mean Maintainer.  If it did, I
would have made these points over and over until death (or until I got
bored).  However, as M: actually means "Mail patches to", there seems
to be very little difference between that and "Designated reviewer"
and makes me wonder why the R: tag was ever even introduced.  I guess
all of the other guys in the threads below also thought M: meant
Maintainer, or else they would have just added poor old Josh as a
"Mail patches to" recipient and been done with it.

Ah, but wait.  get_maintainer.pl *does* assume M means Maintainer
doesn't it?  Which is why this came about.  So if we have a "Mail
patches to" entry, get_maintainer.pl tells the user that this is a

Joe already answered but I'll elaborate a little bit:

"M:" means "Mail patches to" and "S:" means "Status" so what
get_maintainers.pl is reports the person in "M:" printing the status
of the file(s).

So for example if the file has "S: Supported" then the person listed
in "M:" is shown as "supporter" while if the status is "S:
Maintained", the person is listed as "maintainer".

There isn't a "Reviewed" status to specify files that are looked by
"Designated reviewers", it can be added but I don't see the reason of
it.

Not sure why you wrote all of this.  We know *why* get_maintainer.pl
does what it does.  What I'm saying is, that I personally believe this
is the wrong behaviour in what I'm *guessing* is the majority of the
time.

quoted

Maintainer, which (given that there are over 1000 unique M: entries
and I know that there are no where near that many actual Maintainers)
means that it's printing out incorrect information most of the time.

Well, that's correct according to your definition of maintainer
(people with a tree that sends pull requests) but I can believe that
there are 1K unique maintainers for different small components
(without taking into account what components may be obsolete / not
used anymore) even if these maintainers don't send pull request
because the patch load is low and rely on subsystem maintainers to
pick directly from the list with their Acks.

Then they are not Maintainers.  They are Reviewers who rely on
Maintainers.  In your example above it's the Maintainers that are
Maintainers and the people who review the code are Reviewers.  The
clues are in the words. ;)

For me the maintainer is that a) cares about the file and makes sure
that things remain working, fix issues, reviews patches from others,
etc b) is someone that actually understand the code in the files. A
subsystem maintainer has the last word of what gets merged into the
subsystem but may not be familiar with code under the subsystem and
relies on the file / driver maintainer to Ack the patch as correct
since that person is the one that knows the code.

Then what is a Reviewer?

quoted

So back to my original thought then, what can we do to rectify this
situation and make the information printed more meaningful.  Again,
I'm back to using the R: tag appropriately.

Any (technical, which aren't based on "but I really want to be listed
as a Maintainer") thoughts?

I haven't read a "but I really want to be listed as a maintainer"
thought in this thread.

If you had no vested interest in this, you would be able to see the
logic in what I'm saying.  Again I'm *guess*, but I think there is
some emotional reasons for you pushing back so hard.  I could always
be wrong though.

I think the problem is the definition of what a maintainer in Linux
really means. For you is someone that keeps a tree and sends pull
request (for me that is what I call a subsystem maintainer)

Right.  A Level 3 Maintainer sends pull-requests to a Level 2
Maintainer, who sends pull-requests to a Level 1 Maintainer, who sends
pull-requests to Linus.  Maintainers at *all* levels collect patches
and Maintain them before sending on.

reiterate:

Reviewers care about particular driver(s)/domain(s) that they know
well.  They provide solid reviews and possible testing (because they
are likely to have the h/w).  They then provide Acked-by:s so that a
Maintainer can collect the patch. 

while for
others it seems that maintainer means someone who care about a set of
files, knows the code, makes sure that things keep working and Ack
patches to those files when posted.

        goto reiterate;   ;)

-- 
Lee Jones
Linaro STMicroelectronics Landing Team Lead
Linaro.org ? Open source software for ARM SoCs
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