[Ksummit-discuss] More productive uses of enthusiastic new kernel developers

Rafael J. Wysocki rjw at rjwysocki.net
Sat May 31 22:53:16 UTC 2014


On Friday, May 30, 2014 10:21:06 PM Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 06:54:07PM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > 
> > I don't think this is a matter of being enthusiastic or not. Much more
> > one of expertise. As a user of stable kernels, I would very much prefer
> > to have it maintained by an expert (or by experts), not by a newcomer.
> > Of course, that may be just me.
> 
> The stable kernel tree would still be maintained by experts.  Even if
> newcomers supplied some of the backports, they would still get
> reviewed by experts.  Granted, for the first few patches it might not
> save me that much time compared to my just doing the backport myself,
> but it's IMHO much more likely to result in a capable programmer in
> the long run (at least compared to people who are just encouraged to
> do drive-by whitespace / spelling patch submissions). 
> 
> And if we have newcomers looking for bug fix patches that weren't
> properly marked with "cc: stable at vger.kernel.org", and calling those
> patches to the stable tree and subsystem maintainers, again, I think
> it's healthier and certainly more productive than traning them to look
> for whitespace and checkpatch.pl warnings.
> 
> If the argument is that newcomers aren't motivated to do this sort of
> grunt work, recall how much grunt work maintainers have to do.  How
> much time do you think most maintainers spend writing new sexy
> features?  As opposed to the less fun bits, such as reviewing code and
> running integration tests and bisecting through submitted patches to
> find the buggy "cleanup" patch someone sent me?  
> 
> If I can find people who don't mind sharing in some of the more less
> glory-filled aspects of being an open source developer, and who isn't
> afraid to do some of the less fun but still vitally important bits,
> speaking personally, those are the people that I would be more
> motivated to mentor.  In contrast, someone who sends thousands of
> whitespace patches is ***not*** someone I'm personally going to be
> much inclined to spend time mentoring.

I totally agree.

Rafael



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