Xen project Mailing List

On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 12:02 PM Andrew Cooper <Andrew.Cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 08/12/2022 10:49, George Dunlap wrote:
> Concerns were raised about two maintainers from the same company
> colluding to get a patch in from their company; but such maintainers
> could already collude, by working on the patch in secret, and posting
> it publicly with only a single author's SoB, and having the other
> person review it.

I know this was how the concern was voices, but it was fairly bogus even
as stated. "same company" or not has no bearing at all on two
maintainers choosing to collude in secret.

The mitigation to all of this is the fact that being a maintainer starts
from having gained trust / reputation in the community, and comes with
the responsibility to not violate that trust. Furthermore, there are
mechanisms in place to deal with issues around said trust being violated.

Right; this sort of "factionalism" might arise due to the shared perspective of being at the same company; but it might just as well arise from something else. For instance, you could imagine pro-"server" maintainers at different companies colluding to get a patch in that they knew was objected to by the part of the community focused on embedded; or pro-"automotive" maintainers at different companies colluding to get a patch in that was objected to by the part of the community focusing on "true embedded" use cases.

Each of these hypothetical cases are covered by requirements #3 and #4: that "sufficient time" must be given to respond, and that there be no open objections. We have mechanisms in place to address whether such requirements were violated.

If you think it's important to have that in the commit message, I can try to re-send it with words to that effect. Personally I think it's fine as it is.

> Signed-off-by: George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks.

-George

Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Clarify check-in requirements for mixed-author patches