Re: [PATCH-for-9.1 v2 2/3] migration: Remove RDMA protocol handling

[Markus Armbruster]

Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 29, 2024 at 08:08:10AM -0500, Michael Galaxy wrote:
>> Hi All (and Peter),
>
> Hi, Michael,
>
>> 
>> My name is Michael Galaxy (formerly Hines). Yes, I changed my last name
>> (highly irregular for a male) and yes, that's my real last name:
>> https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrgalaxy/)
>> 
>> I'm the original author of the RDMA implementation. I've been discussing
>> with Yu Zhang for a little bit about potentially handing over maintainership
>> of the codebase to his team.
>> 
>> I simply have zero access to RoCE or Infiniband hardware at all,
>> unfortunately. so I've never been able to run tests or use what I wrote at
>> work, and as all of you know, if you don't have a way to test something,
>> then you can't maintain it.
>> 
>> Yu Zhang put a (very kind) proposal forward to me to ask the community if
>> they feel comfortable training his team to maintain the codebase (and run
>> tests) while they learn about it.
>
> The "while learning" part is fine at least to me.  IMHO the "ownership" to
> the code, or say, taking over the responsibility, may or may not need 100%
> mastering the code base first.  There should still be some fundamental
> confidence to work on the code though as a starting point, then it's about
> serious use case to back this up, and careful testings while getting more
> familiar with it.

How much experience we expect of maintainers depends on the subsystem
and other circumstances.  The hard requirement isn't experience, it's
trust.  See the recent attack on xz.

I do not mean to express any doubts whatsoever on Yu Zhang's integrity!
I'm merely reminding y'all what's at stake.

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