Maintaining small drm drivers

[Daniel Vetter]

On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 8:53 AM, Daniel Vetter <daniel at 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).
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch