[ogb-discuss] Device Driver Community

[Alan DuBoff]

On Thu, 3 May 2007, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> Alan DuBoff wrote:
>> My reccomendation is to have only 1 core contributer, Garrett.
>
> The constitution [1] requires a minimum of 3.   Given that Garrett,
> Murayama and Juergen all have Core Contributor status from the OGB,
> I would be tempted to name them as the three initial Core Contributors
> of the Device Driver community.

I would think that a core contributer would have the skills and/or 
knowledge of how the entire system works. While I don't have a problem 
with Murayama and/or Juergen having core contributer status, I'm curious 
how that was determined. I would hope that a core contributer could liason 
an entire putback and know all the proceedures forward and back so they 
could help assist the community. Not to dis Murayama, he has written a lot 
of drivers for the community and I have plans to put some back after I get 
the current afe driver I'm working on, complete.

> It's up to each community what sort of contributions count towards status,
> so it's not changing the rules if you haven't made any yet.
>
> I believe that contributions such as Max teaching and writing documentation
> on device driver writing are just as important to the vital functioning of
> the community as actually writing the code.

Ok, this is different than I was thinking. I was thinking more in terms of 
an official person that had the last word on actual putbacks for our 
community. Each community should have such a person and/or rely on the OGB 
as a whole to provide that.

> Since Device Drivers doesn't own a consolidation of it's own, just integrates
> to consolidations such as ON, it doesn't really seem to get a vote on who can
> do a putback - certainly Core Contributor status in a community is not tied 
> to
> putback rights in any consolidation I'm aware of.

I'm thinking in terms of having leadership which the community can turn to 
when needing counseling and/or assitance in a putback. A person that 
understands and have gone through the process, but that has contributed 
enough to Solaris/OpenSolaris to substantiate it.

> The definitions from the constitution [1] are:

And both Juergen and Murayama fit that? Hmmm...ok. There should be better 
guidelines than that, IMO, and/or better control over the process.

Ultimately we need to way to prevent code from just flying back into 
OpenSolaris, I had thought the contributors and core contributers might be 
the means to do that...my bad...doesn't seem the core contributers, or 
even contributers will make much difference in that regard, and in fact it 
is probably only voting rights. I was hoping they had some control over 
the community at large.

--

Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group