[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] hobbyist recruiting

[Wolfram Sang]

> > that there really is no central TODO list. Maybe there could be a 
> > Documentation/NewcomersStartHere-like file that would list for
> > instance the TODO files in drivers/staging? It's nothing big, but
> > would certainly help people find their ways.

To be honest, I think it is something big. Keeping a file up-to-date
which has detailed information from various subsystems is quite some
task. More subsystem specific TODO files might be helpful, iff the
maintainer manages to keep it up to date. From a newbie, I'd expect to
find out how to find all TODO files in a kernel tree ;)

> It certainly wouldn't hurt, but I'm not sure if this will really solve
> much. In general all you have to do is find the subsystem mailinglist
> (or email of the subsystem maintainer) you are interested in and post
> an email offering to help. Generally there are always jobs available
> that need doing.

If you lurk around a mailing list of a subsystem (or read the gmane
archives), you will easily find out about its issues and shortcomings.

> My experience though is that there is a big gap between offering to do
> some work and actually doing that, and at least as large a gap from
> going from posting a single patch to becoming a regular contributor.

+1

> One issue might be that as a 'newbie' the problems you can work on
> initially tend to be simple and often relatively boring ones (code cleanup,
> sparse fixes, etc). Any work on core code often requires substantial
> experience.

For me, I am not so much short of patches, I am short of reviewers. And
that needs some time and good will of a new person to get into it.
Reading old reviews, playing with the subsystem ("why is it done this
way?"), digging through git history to understand the organic growth...

> I guess that this might be why most of the regular contributors started
> out trying to support their own or their company's hardware. Which tends
> to be a project at the right level: challenging yet typically not overly
> difficult, and you learn a lot about the subsystem (software, process and
> people).

Agree. That is why I point people to OpenWRT which has tons of hardware
support which is not mainline. And old routers can quite easily be
obtained. Yet, one must be willing enough to get support of a mostly
outdated HW into the kernel, just for the fun of it.

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