[ovs-dev] [PATCH 2/4] MAINTAINERS: Start listing area maintainers.

[Russell Bryant]

On 01/27/2016 06:56 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 03:38:03PM -0500, Russell Bryant wrote:
>> Adopt a subset of the syntax used in the Linux kernel MAINTAINERS file
>> for expressing maintainership of subsets of the code base.  To start, I
>> added a catch-all section and a section for OVN.  Other entries will
>> come in later patches so that they can be reviewed independently.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Russell Bryant <russell at ovn.org>
> 
> I'm worried about this making OVS development more "territorial".  Do
> you have any thoughts about that?
> 

Fair question.

First off, if you think this could be seen as anything different than
documenting the current reality, then it shouldn't be merged.

The larger context here is that I've been working on OVS (OVN, mostly)
for a year now.  I'm trying to think of anything that I've learned in
that time about how the project operates that isn't written down
somewhere.  My hope for writing things like this down are to make life a
little easier for future new contributors, but also to leave less about
the project up to interpretation/rumor/FUD/whatever.

In this case, over time I've picked up that in general, there are
certainly people that effectively watch over certain areas.  It's come
up in conversation at least a couple of times.  It's not that it's
anything strict necessarily, but it's roughly how things work out.

One way to address that is to just accept that these sorts of dynamics
are normal team dynamics, and the size of the project doesn't justify
needing to write it down in this kind of detail.  I'm OK with that, too.
 Writing this down has its own awkward downsides.  Leaving it unwritten
just means a slightly steeper "community navigation" learning curve for
newer contributors.

I'm OK going either way here, but hopefully that helps explain my
motivation.

-- 
Russell Bryant