On Wed, 1 Apr 2015 18:46:10 -0700 Matt Turner <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Bill Spitzak <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 03/30/2015 10:25 AM, Matt Turner wrote: > > > >> Do you just need someone to push them? > >> > >> I'm not capable of reviewing these. > >> > >> Since Søren isn't really maintaining pixman anymore I'm not really > >> sure how to proceed. > > > > > > Is this true? > > I don't see anyone but Pekka reviewing patches and there hasn't been a > release in 15 months, so yeah. > > > I think something needs to be done about this as all new work on X and Cairo > > is depending on pixman. > > I mean, sure. > > > I have had an outstanding patch set for 8 months now. Søren responded to an > > earlier version and I tried to address it but have not heard anything since. > > This is very frustrating as I would like to work on this but I'm not going > > to do it if it is useless. > > As far as I know, Søren isn't working at Redhat any more, so I don't > think you can expect him to continue maintaining pixman. Ok. Søren, Matt, Siarhei, how can we get the Pixman maintenance communitized? Maybe a la libdrm, because no-one has the resources to become a dedicated maintainer? What does it take to get push and release authorization, in the political sense that Pixman quality would not degrade and the current/old maintainers would approve? What kind of review policies should be enforced? What development guidelines should there be? Should it be strictly no new API/ABI nor features, only performance work and new platform support like the latest new ARM? If there is one person contributing arch or cpu-specific optimizations in assembly that no-one is willing to review apart from the scope of code changes and style, should we trust that one person and just land his work if he shows the performance numbers are good? I mean, I'm a newbie here. I don't want to hijack this project and push it only to my own directions, also because I cannot become a dedicated maintainer, nor promise to review anyone else's stuff. But, there are patches I'd like to see landed. I could work on them with Ben, but if there is no-one "upstream" to tell us what goes and what doesn't, we are left to our own judgement. Would you trust my and Ben's judgement so that I could land Ben's patches and make Pixman releases? You probably don't have a good understanding about how I work and what kind of a developer I am, nor have that kind of trust in me. That is fine. We need time to build that trust through discussion and patches. But it's hard to have a discussion if no-one can reply. I also understand that because I will not promise to be a maintainer, there is less incentive in educating me. It is quite likely that I hang around here for a while and then wander off when my needs are filled. The same goes for everyone, I believe. What could we do to let Pixman go forward? I suppose a project in a similar state would just get forked by some new people, who will then drive it with their own goals. Except here that doesn't work, because the fork would soon fall into the same state as the original project, except the world would just be more fragmented. Couldn't we as well just loosen up on the master branch and let stuff land whenever someone is active and someone else doesn't see anything bad in it? There are always the stable branches, too, for those who want to stick to old and well-tested code. Yes, the software quality will likely degrade somewhat, at least from the old maintainers' perspective. However, the alternative seems to be a completely stalled project. Which one is better? FWIW, distros (well, Raspbian at least) already maintain their own forks, most likely as a single-person project. At upstream we could at least aim for a different person to review a change than the one who wrote it. For distribution users, that should be a win, along with gathering development into one place. Am I asking for your approval to get push rights to Pixman upstream? Hmm, I suppose I am. At least that would make me personally responsible for the stuff I push, without having to piggyback on someone else who might then fear getting unjustified blame. I will certainly reserve the right to say: "No, I won't push that, because I can't tell if it is good for Pixman or not." Thanks, pq _______________________________________________ Pixman mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pixman
