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

Julia Lawall julia.lawall at lip6.fr
Mon Jul 20 08:27:39 UTC 2015



On Mon, 20 Jul 2015, James Bottomley wrote:

> On Mon, 2015-07-20 at 00:19 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > On Fri, 17 Jul 2015, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> >
> > [ ... snip ... ]
> > > But that was an exception because the code submitted was really worth
> > > while
> >
> > This really made me wonder. Maybe we should really focus on why such
> > ocasions need to be pointed out as exceptions.
> >
> > Is it that Linux kernel development got hyped so much that everyone wants
> > to have that bullet in his CV, no matter how stupid the submitted patch
> > would be?
> >
> > If so, what should we do to change it?
> >
> > I.e. I might propose a a slightly controversial topic, going a bit the
> > other direction than the whole "motivating newcomers" discussion: how to
> > get rid of useless submissions that are slowing maintainers down?
>
> I second.  I think we concentrate too much on contribution and not
> enough on useful contribution.
>
> > Should we stop publishing all the statistics? I believe there is no
> > question that those are one of the primary drivers of useless submissions.
> > Once maintainers get DoSed by submissions of wrong and/or useless patches
> > that eat non-negligible amount of their time, we're in trouble.
>
> I'm not sure it's just the stats.  We also have to be careful about
> negative perceptions, so I don't think we want to go around highlighting
> bad patches.  There are a couple of patch sets that are draining review
> talent from my point of view: the mechanical one file at a time fixing
> X.  I think we need someone to be the gatekeeper and review and apply
> the script in one go.  And perhaps we should call the other "small
> patches which don't fix bugs" ... I'm less sure what to do about these.

If there really is a problem that some maintainer is getting inundated
with patches addressing unimportant cosmetic issues, could it be a good
idea to:

* Fix the code and get it over with,
* Drop the code from the kernel, if no one uses it, or
* Put a comment in the file saying that the file is no longer being
actively developed and only bug fixes will be accepted.

julia


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