Re: [edk2-devel] [PATCH v6 00/14] Add the VariablePolicy feature

["Laszlo Ersek" <lersek@redhat.com>]

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On 09/11/20 17:18, Bret Barkelew wrote:
> 11 Days to go. I will single out an email every day…
> 
>  
> 
> Jian, today is your day.
> How’s it going? Life good? Yeah, I know. Things are crazy here, too.
> Seattle is covered in smoke.
> You know what would brighten things up, though? A nice “reviewed by”.

I think we should discuss the review / maintenance status of core
subsystems in edk2 on the next stewards' call (in October).

A maintainer has power to block contributions by simply doing nothing.
Because of this, maintainership is a big responsibility, and
responsiveness is critical. If there is regularly no maintainer
feedback, then the affected subsystem should be considered orphaned,
and/or new co-maintainers should be added. It is not pleasant, but it
does occur over time. In particular, with a fine-grained
"Maintainers.txt", it's possible to assign reviewership / maintenance to
feature areas / groups of subsystems.

The edk2 project has to decide whether it encourages / values
contributions, or if it prefers contributors to fork and go their own
way. We should be clear and open about this. Whoever is willing to pony
up the resources needed for maintenance gets to be maintainer. Maybe not
in the orginal project but in a fork; but that's not a huge difference
from this perspective -- over time, the old project can wither and the
fork can take over.

I'm not sure if that was the original intent with Project Mu, but when
Project Mu was launched (as I perceived it), the edk2-devel list used to
be *way* more lively than it is now. Displacing upstream edk2 looked
unthinkable -- and like a really bad idea -- back then. But now this
list, if it's not dead, smells funny.

I would support adding Microsoft engineers as reviewers to core
subsystems. We could do that gradually. And until we switch over to
github.com completely, I'd be happy to help with merging patch sets for
core subsystems that have been reviewed. (Assuming the project does not
want to hand out more push access rights, in the time remaining until we
switch over to github.com.)

Bret, I'm really sorry it's taking so long; I know first hand it's
maddening. I'm especially embarrassed, on behalf of the project, because
there have been several Microsoft contributions lately, all using the
mailing list based workflow correctly and natively -- and such efforts
*deserve* timely feedback from maintainers.

Laszlo