From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.35]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 9B740BB3 for ; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 01:14:01 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-ie0-f169.google.com (mail-ie0-f169.google.com [209.85.223.169]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 1AD97AA for ; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 01:14:01 +0000 (UTC) Received: by ieru20 with SMTP id u20so2705178ier.0 for ; Tue, 07 Jul 2015 18:14:00 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: jwboyer@gmail.com In-Reply-To: <1481488.5WJFbB0Dlm@vostro.rjw.lan> References: <201507080121.41463.PeterHuewe@gmx.de> <1481488.5WJFbB0Dlm@vostro.rjw.lan> Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2015 21:14:00 -0400 Message-ID: From: Josh Boyer To: "Rafael J. Wysocki" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Cc: Jason Cooper , ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists) List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 9:29 PM, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > On Wednesday, July 08, 2015 01:21:40 AM Peter Huewe wrote: >> Hi, >> >> In order to continue our traditions I would like to propose again the topic of >> recruitment, but this time not only limiting to the hobbyists market. >> >> We are definitely short on reviewers and thus have mostly overloaded >> maintainers. >> For testers it's usually even worse - how many patches are actually tested? >> Judging from what I read on LKML not that many. >> >> So we should definitely discuss: >> - how can we encourage hobbyists to become regular contributors >> -- how to keep people interested, the drop-out rates are huge. >> - encourage regular contributors to become reviewers and testers >> - reviewers to become co-maintainers and finally maintainers (once the >> original maintainer is used up or moves up/on) > > Good topic. > > Unfortunately, there are not too many incentives for people to become > code reviewers or testers, or at least to spend more time reviewing patches. > > Most of the time there's a little to no recognition for doing that work and, > quite frankly, writing code is more rewarding than that for the majority of > people anyway. > > The only way to address this problem I can see is to recognize reviewers > *much* more than we tend to do and not just "encourage" them, because that's > way insufficient. You could make a Reviewed-by tag required before a patch can be included in a submaintainer's tree. At least some maintainers seem to (arbitrarily?) require this at times. However, if you do that then it would likely slow down development quite a bit. Then Greg might cry because he wouldn't get to show pretty graphs at conferences about how fast the rate of change is in the kernel. (I would love to see a graph comparing rate of change to rate of regressions/bugs, but then people would have to know the latter.) josh