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

[Laurent Pinchart]

On Wednesday 08 July 2015 14:53:15 Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Wed, 08 Jul 2015 09:00:32 +0100 jic23 at jic23.retrosnub.co.uk wrote:
> > > We can alter that somewhat.  We used to run a Maintainers lottery for
> > > the kernel summit ... we could instead offer places based on the number
> > > of Reviewed-by: tags ... we have all the machinery to calculate that.  I
> > > know an invitation to the kernel summit isn't a huge incentive, but it's
> > > a useful one.
> > 
> > Sounds like a good idea to me, though it would only effect a tiny
> > percentage of our reviewers.  I suppose publishing a short list of the top
> > n% of reviewers from which the lottery runs might give some
> > recognition.
> 
> I personally don't trust a Reviewed-by tag much, as I sometimes see
> them appear without any comments.
> 
> I was thinking of writing a perl script that would read my LKML archive
> and somewhat intelligently looking at people who replied to patches,
> that also has snippets of the patch in the reply, and counting them. I
> think that would be a more accurate use of real reviewers than just the
> Reviewed-by tag.

Reviewed-by or Acked-by metrics are unfortunately very easy to game. If we 
could make them more robust, we could publish statistics as we do for commits 
authorship (http://remword.com/kps_result/ for instance) and start mentioning 
people's names in kernel development reports. That might not be much, but it 
could help reviewers feeling valued for their work.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart