[oe] [RFC] recipe owners

[Tom Rini]

Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
> 2010/7/27 Chris Larson <clarson at kergoth.com>
> 
>> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 3:19 AM, Frans Meulenbroeks <
>> fransmeulenbroeks at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> PS: I think part of the problem is that most recipes do not have a
>>> well-defined owner who is responsible for maintaining them. I know we use
>>> to
>>> have them  mentioned in the recipes. That had some issues, but at least
>> it
>>> was more clear who felt responsible for what, and it was also more clear
>>> who
>>> to bother to fix a recipe (and it was more clear which recipes are
>> orphaned
>>> or become orphaned when the maintainer leaves).
>>
>> I very strongly agree with this, but there have been issues with it in the
>> past, due to people leaving the project, vacations, hiatus, they become a
>> bottleneck.  But conceptually, maintainership seems like a very good idea
>> to
>> me.  If I considered myself the maintainer of a set of recipes, I'd do my
>> best to ensure that they're always buildable and the recipes are always up
>> with current conventions.  *shrug*
>>
> 
> Chris, thanks for your reply.
> I've turned this into a separate thread.
> 
> I'm well aware of the issues that caused us to leave recipe owners (and move
> to the MAINTAINERS file).
> However for lots of recipes it is now completely in limbo who maintains them
> (if anyone).
> As such the current solution seems to be less than the solution with
> maintainer(s) per recipe.
> 
> Wrt the issues you mention: I understand this. It is unavoidable that people
> e.g. leave, so we could take that into account.
> Some ideas to tackle this:
>  - still allow others to do small changes even if the maintainer cannot be
> contacted (this is what to some  (this is similar to what we have in our
> current commit policy:
> 
>  * It's fine to fix a recipe you don't maintain, but its polite to talk to
>    any else actively maintaining that recipe. Try to contact the maintainer
>    or, if no maintainer is listed, send a note to the OE developer mailing list.
> 
> - if people maintain a recipe but they become non-responsive without known
> cause (e.g. no holidays, known issues, business trips, ...) the recipe
> becomes orphaned and someone can step up to become the new maintainer (I
> assume that someone is interested in the recipe, otherwise the orphanage of
> the recipe would probably not be noticed). Btw: it is quite ok for me if a
> recipe has >1 maintainer (and for core recipes I would even encourage that).
> We can define some terms to quantify non-responsiveness if needed (e.g. not
> responding to ML messages concerning your recipes for 3 weeks)
> 
> What do others feel about this ?

I think this could help in some ways.  But here's the other problem I 
see.  There's a handful of complex recipes and a handful of complex 
classes that support recipes.  But by and large recipes are short and 
shouldn't be hard to understand.  So if there's a problem, fix a 
problem.  Most people, I hope, should feel OK editing most recipes.

That said, we shouldn't be too afraid to remove recipes.  We've got an 
scm and any given recipe shouldn't be more than a git revert <hash> 
along with a follow up commit to fix things from coming back.

-- 
Tom Rini
Mentor Graphics Corporation