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

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 9:29 PM, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw at rjwysocki.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 08, 2015 01:21:40 AM Peter Huewe wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In order to continue our traditions I would like to propose again the topic of
>> recruitment, but this time not only limiting to the hobbyists market.
>>
>> We are definitely short on reviewers and thus have mostly overloaded
>> maintainers.
>> For testers it's usually even worse - how many patches are actually tested?
>> Judging from what I read on LKML not that many.
>>
>> So we should definitely discuss:
>> - how can we encourage hobbyists to become regular contributors
>> -- how to keep people interested, the drop-out rates are huge.
>> - encourage regular contributors to become reviewers and testers
>> - reviewers to become co-maintainers and finally maintainers (once the
>> original maintainer is used up or moves up/on)
>
> Good topic.
>
> Unfortunately, there are not too many incentives for people to become
> code reviewers or testers, or at least to spend more time reviewing patches.
>
> Most of the time there's a little to no recognition for doing that work and,
> quite frankly, writing code is more rewarding than that for the majority of
> people anyway.
>
> The only way to address this problem I can see is to recognize reviewers
> *much* more than we tend to do and not just "encourage" them, because that's
> way insufficient.

You could make a Reviewed-by tag required before a patch can be
included in a submaintainer's tree.  At least some maintainers seem to
(arbitrarily?) require this at times.  However, if you do that then it
would likely slow down development quite a bit.  Then Greg might cry
because he wouldn't get to show pretty graphs at conferences about how
fast the rate of change is in the kernel.

(I would love to see a graph comparing rate of change to rate of
regressions/bugs, but then people would have to know the latter.)

josh