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

[Justin Pettit]

> On Jan 27, 2016, at 4:45 PM, Russell Bryant <russell at ovn.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm OK going either way here, but hopefully that helps explain my
> motivation.

I understand the motivation and agree with it in principal, but I share Ben's concern about it becoming territorial.  Understanding the landscape is really only important when it comes to committers, since they could in theory commit something that someone with more domain expertise doesn't like.  Historically, this hasn't been a big deal, since there was only one project (OVS), and by the time someone became a committer, they had a pretty good lay of the land.  Now that we have OVN, someone could have an understanding of one project, but start committing in the other without knowing who the experts are.

I suspect that in the long term, OVN will become a standalone project with its own set of committers that is not identical to OVS's.  I think then we'd be back with the committers generally knowing who works on what in their particular project, and it will sort of solve itself.  If we start declaring "owners" of certain modules, we could move from a de facto holding back for a knowledgable opinion to developers declaring that people can't commit to "their" modules.

--Justin