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

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2015-07-09 at 12:37 -0700, Darren Hart wrote:
> I spend a highly disproportionate amount of my time, relative to measurable
> quality impact to the kernel, going over the nuances of submitting patches.
> 
> 1) Must have a complete commit message
> 2) DCO goes above the ---
> 3) Include a patch changelog, do so below ---
> 4) Cc maintainers :-)
> 5) Checkpatch... checkpatch... checkpatch...
> 6) Compiler warnings
> 7) CodingStyle :-)
> 8) Use ascii or utf8 character encodings
> 
> All of these are distractions from reviewing the code. I'm often on 
> version 3 of a series before I'm actually reviewing content.

I don't think it's entirely appropriate to call all of those
'distractions'.

The "content" in question is a proposed change to the code base. Such a
change requires a coherent commit message which will make sense when we
look back at this commit in the future. We will need to understand what
was happening and why, in order to fix it or tweak it for new
circumstances.

Doing that is *not* a peculiarity of the Linux 'process'. It is basic
engineering discipline, and it is *part* of the work. Just like the
task of breaking a change down into incremental, bisectable commits —
which I'm surprised wasn't in your list.

Yes, there are a lot of people who *lack* that basic engineering
discipline, to the point where it *can* start to look like it's a Linux
-only requirement. But it's not. And there's not a lot we can do if an
"engineer" lacks it, short of educating them. That part isn't a process
issue.

Likewise, compiler warnings. If your developers are actually
*submitting* code with unresolved compiler warnings, again there's not
a lot we can do to help them or you. Apart from confiscating their
keyboard.

Coding style, again, isn't a Linux-specific thing. All large code bases
attempt to have some kind of consistency to make the code readable, and
anyone attempting to work on *any* code base should expect to become
familiar with the idioms and conventions (and charset choice) of the
code they're working on.

These *aren't* process issues, in my view. What you're saying with some
of these is that you're having to do *basic* (non-Linux-specific)
education of people who want to contribute code, and that *that*
doesn't scale. Which is true, but it's hard to know how to address
that, except with programs like GSoC etc.

Josh suggests that we should provide a service that people could push
code to and 'get automated feedback on what needs fixing'... but isn't
that what checkpatch was for? OK, a local tool can't cross-compile it
for you on every platform we support, but it can do a lot of stuff
short of that.

I do like the idea of a 'test' mailing list which receives patches and
checks them for corruption though.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation