The Embedded Open Source Summit took place from April 16-18 in Seattle, Washington, alongside the Open Source Summit North America. The Zephyr Developer Summit was part of the EOSS, aimed at developers using or considering Zephyr in embedded products. This year, we concentrated on supporting topics relevant to Zephyr users, upstream contributors, and maintainers.
More than 860 individuals from 721 organizations across 46 countries registered for the EOSS conference. The Zephyr track featured over 50 technical sessions, both in-person and on-demand, focusing on users, upstream developers, and maintainers.
Videos from the Zephyr Developer Summit are available on the Zephyr Project YouTube channel. We will highlight a few videos each week in a blog for easy access.
Today we are featuring:
Meet the Maintainers BoF – Anas Nashif, Intel
Meet the Maintainers BoF – Anas Nashif, Intel
The “Meet the Maintainers” Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at the Zephyr developer Summit was held to discuss the roles, responsibilities, and challenges of maintainership in the Zephyr project. Anas Nashif from Intel led the session, highlighting the forum’s purpose to improve project processes and address gaps in maintainership. The session emphasized the need for clear communication and effective review processes within the project.
Key topics included:
Review Time and Processes: A significant issue raised was the review time for pull requests, including the lack of timely reviews and the need for proper feedback mechanisms. The session discussed the importance of the “4-eye principle” to ensure code changes are properly reviewed by different stakeholders to maintain neutrality and quality.
RFC Process: The Request for Comments (RFC) process was highlighted as an area needing improvement to ensure ideas and features are properly introduced and reviewed without wasting contributors’ time.
Maintainer Responsibilities and Onboarding: The session addressed the need to clarify and document the roles and responsibilities of maintainers. There was a discussion on encouraging contributors to add themselves to the maintainer file to get notifications for relevant areas, and how to handle the onboarding of new maintainers and contributors.
Managing Large Changes: The difficulty of pushing through significant changes was discussed, with suggestions to establish timelines and clearer processes to ensure justified proposals progress even if initial objections arise.
Security and Trust: The potential for malicious contributions was mentioned, with a discussion on safeguards such as the “4-eye principle” and the importance of building trust within the community.
CI and Documentation: Continuous Integration (CI) was recognized as a crucial tool for maintaining code quality, though there are challenges with contributors understanding and fixing CI issues. Improving documentation and providing better tips and tricks for contributors were suggested.
Community Growth and Feedback: The importance of feedback from the community was emphasized, with maintainers encouraged to be transparent and open to suggestions to improve the project.
LTS Release Preparation: The session touched on the upcoming 3.7 LTS release, discussing lessons learned from previous releases and the importance of aligning with external module versions and release processes.
The session concluded with an open floor for contributors to ask questions and provide feedback, emphasizing the need for ongoing communication and collaboration to keep the project growing and thriving.
Watch the rest of the Zephyr Developer Summit videos here. The schedule and links to the PPT presentations can be found here. Photos from the EOSS can be found here.
For more information about the 2024 event, stay tuned by subscribing to the Zephyr quarterly newsletter or connect with us on @ZephyrIoT, Zephyr Project LinkedIn or the Zephyr Discord Channel to talk with community and TSC members.