[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Mesa 17.3.x release problems and process improvements

[Mark Janes]

Kenneth Graunke <kenneth at whitecape.org> writes:

> On Friday, March 9, 2018 12:12:28 PM PDT Mark Janes wrote:
> [snip]
>> I've been doing this for Intel.  Developers are on the hook to fix their
>> bugs, but you can't make them do it.  They have many pressures on them,
>> and a maintainer can't make the call as to whether a rendering bug is
>> more important than day-1 vulkan conformance, for example.
>> 
>> We could heighten the transparency of what is blocking the build by
>> publicizing the authors of bisected blocking bugs to Phoronix, which
>> might get things moving.
>
> I hope you're being sarcastic here, or else I'm misunderstanding your
> proposal.  Public shaming of developers who create bugs has absolutely
> no place in the Mesa community, IMHO.  It would foster the kind of toxic
> community that none of us want to be a part of.

You are correct, it was a stupid thing to write.  I don't have any
*good* ideas for getting the release branch to a point where we can meet
our goals for users.

> Sometimes, people who create bugs are the very people that work the
> hardest, who the project may not even exist without.  Would you want
> to chew out someone for creating a bug in a Vulkan driver when...if it
> weren't for that person, you wouldn't have a Vulkan driver at all?  Or,
> maybe they caused a couple bad bugs...but also fixed hundreds of them.
>
> Other times, they're new contributors or volunteers who do this, not as
> their day job.  Frankly, those people are under no obligation to help us
> at all, so we need to thank them and appreciate the time and effort they
> spend - and give them a hand fixing things when they're too busy, or
> don't have the relevant hardware or skill to track down a regression.
>
> It's easy to be pissed off when there are bugs, and things seem to not
> be making progress, but let's try and keep things positive and work
> together to make Mesa the best we can.

It's true that I spend too much time looking at bugs.  I will often lose
whole days to coping with regressions, and it has made me cranky over
time.