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

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 3:14 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> 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.

It's far too common to send out a patch series, receive lots of valuable
comments and suggestions, adapt according to feedback, and send out again
(repeat a few cycles). Suddenly the patches looks perfect, no more comments,
but also no Acked-by or Reviewed-By. Just silence.

Requiring a Reviewed-by tag is not a solution, unless there's a real
incentive for people to add such tags. Finding such an incentive can be
difficult, and may turn out to make matters worse (cfr. patent officers paid
per patent granted).

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert at linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds