[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Sudip Mukherjee]

>On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 5:43 AM, Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> wrote:
>
> I applaud your attempt here, and don't want to stop you from working on
> it, but I think the real issue is having people actually look for the
> documentation and tools we already have created to do this.  If you make
> yet-another-tool, how are you going to advertise it any better than the
> existing tools/documentation are?
I don't know if i should give my opinion here. I am here for almost one
year and am coming from Eudyptula. I think this thread was regarding
recruitment and high dropout rates.
So from a newbie's point of view, setting up git or mutt was never a
problem. Ok, maybe everyone needs to send his/her first patch two or
three itmes until he gets it right in the formating or commit message
or subject. But sending it using git send-email never had been a problem.
In my opinion the main problem is lack of direction or guidance. As a
newbie I send my first patch, it gets accepted, I have a party to
celebrate and do more style correction and few more patches are accepted.
But by that time I am getting bored with just style correction and want
to do something more.
Now the problem starts. No one is there to guide me and I as a newbie
will not be that much capable enough to find things to do on my own. And
I start loosing the interest. Newbies who are coming from Eudyptula or
starting on their own will face this. But on the otherhand participants
of Outreachy will get a Mentor to guide them and gets a stipend to keep
them motivated. Stipend may not matter to the right candidate who has
interest but having a mentor is the big difference.

Another problem, when a newbie tries to move out of staging to some other
subsystem he likes, the maintainer may not be that much responsive. Just
for example, i submitted a patch on November, 2014 and I am yet to receive
a reply or review to that and the patch was not a style correction patch.

And using git send-email and mutt with gmail is very easy, you do not
need to do any change in gmail. If you want I can give my .gitconfig
and .muttrc for your reference.

regards
sudip