On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 9:35 AM, Daniel Vetter daniel@ffwll.ch wrote:
On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 8:53 AM, Daniel Vetter daniel@ffwll.ch wrote:
Find another smaller driver in need of some cleanup (we can add more to drm-misc), cross review. Yes it's a bit of work (see above), but at least from the drm subsystem pov the end result will be worth it, since more code sharing and more collaboration gives us a much stronger community.
I'm currently at a conference so I figured I'd ask around. So far, people are reluctant to get their hands dirty in a driver they've never looked at before and don't have hardware to test. From a community perspective, would you agree to require review by AMD for all Intel patches and vice versa (a slight exaggeration, I know)? I'd say that would cripple development of both drivers. There is as you say the a-b tag but I honestly doubt it's useful.
Small driver = only 1 regular contributor. AMD and intel are anything but small. And yes if I'd maintain a small driver I'd welcome to have a regular exchange with other maintainers to make sure my driver is up to date with drm best practices. Again gma500 is a bit special since it's not moving anymore.
To make it clearer what I meant to say: It's of course better if your reviewer has domain knowledge about your code, but if there's only 1 regular contributor a bit of review is imo still good. As soon as there's a few regular contributors then a review sub-group in drm-misc forms (e.g. like what's happened with bridge drivers, and we documented that in MAINTAINERS).
Yes, a reviewer pool would be a good idea. Not just for drm-misc but for patches on dri-devel in general. Handling of "unsorted" patches with no direct maintainer can be improved.
Basically what I get from this is that we sacrifice some convenience for small drivers on behalf of the bigger ones. I think that's fair during the circumstances. Not optimal, but fair. I'll be using drm-misc for smaller stuff and send larger series as p-r to Dave (with r-b if I can get them). I think that makes most sense from a gma500 pov.
Cheers Patrik
-Daniel
Daniel Vetter Software Engineer, Intel Corporation +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch