Re: [PATCH 5/5] MAINTAINERS: Add Lukas Wunner as co-maintainer of thunderbolt

From: Mika Westerberg
Date: Thu Sep 13 2018 - 05:01:03 EST


On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 12:33:33PM +0300, Mika Westerberg wrote:
> Hi Lukas,
>
> I'm including Greg here in case I've done something wrong as a maintainer.
> Since I've only maintained Thunderbolt quite short time, it may be that
> I've done mistakes but certainly I did not deliberately try to make life of
> people developing this for older Apple systems harder.

Greg did not yell at me (yet) so I guess I'm doing OK :)

> On Sun, Sep 09, 2018 at 11:42:01PM +0200, Lukas Wunner wrote:
> > Andreas Noever has let it be known off-list already a while ago that he
> > currently cannot spare as much time for Thunderbolt development as he'd
> > like. As a result the driver's development has become dominated by
> > Intel.
>
> I was not aware of this. Althought Andreas has not commented much
> lately, I thought he is still looking after our changes. I hope he still
> is :)
>
> > I would like to step up as co-maintainer to provide additional checks
> > and balances and prevent the driver from degenerating into an Intel-only
> > show. A number of things really irk me:
>
> I don't have anything against this but at the same time I'm afraid it
> might lead to a situation where the Thunderbolt driver evolution gets
> stopped into its tracks because of unnecessary fighting over each patch
> and change which does not benefit Linux kernel in general.

I think we have enough maintainers in this subsystem:

Andreas - Apple hardware
Michael and me - Intel
Yehezkel - Microsoft

But I think we can make you a dedicated reviewer. This should make sure
you get to review all the patches touching this subsystem.

However, first I would like to get confirmation from Andreas that he
approves this.

I also would like that anyone submitting patches to this subsystem do
not get bad feelings during the review but instead possible issues and
improvement suggestions are written in such way that the submitter feels
his work is valued (even if not always correct).

This is especially important when a random Intel (well, or Apple)
engineer submits a patch, say fixing a typo in a comment of some data
structure. There is no point starting to demand that the specific
register meaning needs to be disclosed. I've said this before but I or
any other Intel engineer do not have any power over when the spec is
released or any other related matter (like disclosing registers) and I
really don't want that every single patch review starts with demanding
people to disclose something extra. After all they are just trying to
improve the driver which is good for Linux.

If Andreas approves this, please send a patch adding you as a reviewer
and I'll apply it. Just please write the changelog in good will without
any personal frustration as those will be recorded forever in the kernel
history and you never know in future who you are working for.

>From my point of view, I welcome you on board as good reviewer :)