[This is a cross-post from the mail I just sent out to intel-gfx.]

Code of conducts seem to be in the news a bit recently, and I realized that I’ve never really documented how we run things. It’s different from the kernel’s overall Xorg Foundation event policy. Anyway, I think this is worth clarifying and here it goes.

It’s simple: Be respectful, open and excellent to each another.

Which doesn’t mean we want to sacrifice quality to be nice. Striving for technical excellence very much doesn’t exclude being excellent to someone else, and in our experience it tends to go hand in hand.

Unfortunately things go south occasionally. So if you feel threatened, personally abused or otherwise uncomfortable, even and especially when you didn’t participate in a discussion yourself, then please raise this in private with the drm/i915 maintainers (currently Simona Vetter and Jani Nikula, see MAINTAINERS for contact information). And the “in private” part is important: Humans screw up, disciplining minor fumbles by tarnishing someones google-able track record forever is out of proportion.

Still there are some teeth to this code of conduct:

  1. First time around minor issues will be raised in private.

  2. On repeat cases a public reply in the discussion will enforce that respectful behavior is expected.

  3. We’ll ban people who don’t get it.

And severe cases will be escalated much quicker.

This applies to all community communication channels (irc, mailing list and bugzilla). And as mentioned this really just is a public clarification of the rules already in place - you can’t see that though since we never had to go further than step 1.

Let’s keep it at that.

And in case you have a problem with an individual drm/i915 maintainer and don’t want to raise it with the other one there’s the linux foundation TAB and the drm upstream maintainer Dave Airlie.