Increased maintainer work during Summer of Code

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Jul 15, 2008, 06:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20080715060427.GB3337@spearce.org>

In reading through the submitted mid-term surveys from students I found this excellent answer from Stephan Beyer:

Q: What advice would you give to future would-be Summer of Code
mentoring organizations?

Show 11 quoted lines

> I am wondering about one thing in git which is perhaps true for
> a lot of other mentoring organizations: There is one person, the
> maintainer, that is the final authority of deciding what patches
> go into the repositories and what not. (This is ok and good and if
> somebody disagrees a lot with such decisions he or she can make up
> a fork repo without problems.) But the point is that the maintainer
> has to review and add a lot of patches each day and _during GSoC
> this is even a lot more_. I sometimes wonder how the maintainer is
> able to handle that much work ;-) So my "advice" could be to think
> about the "problem" of more contributions during GSoC, and if it
> is useful to have co-maintainers or something. :)

Junio, I know you have been working extra hard lately with the merge of builtin merge, and now gitweb and the sequencer are also being looked at in much greater detail.

What can we do to smooth out this workload better? Its awesome that we were so fortunate to get these great students this year, and have so much contributed in so little time, but we also do not want to see maintainer burn-out. We also want to avoid a huge backlog of patches.

I don't think we really ever talked about how to help Junio work through these large contributions that are coming his way.

-- 
Shawn.