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

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

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.

At the other end of the scale, perhaps we should be doing more to
recognise good contributions.  Greg suggested prizes for first
contributions, but what about in addition one more, say for best bug fix
of the week (or month depending on who's running it and how much time it
sucks)?  We could have the maintainers nominate ones they think are good
and whoever's running this picks the best.

James