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

[Mark Brown]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 07:24:35PM +0300, James Bottomley wrote:

> Seriously, what is the actual problem?  Who bites the heads off newbies
> for sport?  I ask because the first patch submission is usually treated
> with helpfulness and tolerance, at least where I've been on the cc list.
> The wrong phase of the merge cycle can be a bugger, particularly when
> most people's attention is elsewhere, but it's not like it's a huge
> deterrent.  We all have developers who'd rather spit rats than submit a
> patch to $opensourceprojecttheyfoundabugin but then, it's sometimes
> because the reply might contradict their own mythology (or question
> their reputation).  Before we embark on a huge does of hair shirt and a
> lavish process dump, what is the problem we're trying to solve?

I think a lot of it is about perception - the whole "Linus will scream
at you for minor issues" meme is pretty strong out there and shapes
perceptions regardless of how true it is.  That said I do think there's
a couple of things that are real.

The response time issues being discussed elsewhere in the thread are
real I think - they are the biggest problem I see when I'm helping
people with patch submissions.  People get very discouraged when they
send something off and either get no response at all or find it
takes a while, they have difficulty in figuring out how to get people to
pay attention.  This is unfortunately quite common.  It's a really
difficult problem to solve with our workflows, at some point submitters
have sent a mail to the right people in close enough to the right format
so the maintainers *should* look at it but still the submitters don't
hear anything back and next steps aren't terribly clear.

I know there's also some stuff that's down to brief replies rather than
active hostility - I'm definitely part of the problem here, I need to
write a bunch of longer form replies and get a workflow for pasting them
into email (actually I think I've got that bit) sorted out.  Type the
same reply a lot and it's easy to optimise it down to brevity.
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