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

["Krzysztof Kozłowski" <k.kozlowski.k@gmail.com>]

2015-07-08 10:14 GMT+09:00 Josh Boyer <jwboyer@fedoraproject.org>:
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 9:29 PM, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@rjwysocki.net> 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.

Enforcing reviewed-by or tested-by tags won't be enough if no one
actually will do the review and testing. The patch can wait
indefinitely with maintainer's response "I expect an independent
review". This goes back to first question - will such enforcement
boost number of reviews or tests?

Before doing some work there is always a cause, an answer to "why I am
doing this"? Employer may pay for my commits but would he pay for
reviewing time? That is his decision and it would be difficult to
change policies inside companies.

Other reason for doing open source work may be the fame. Being
recognizable, getting better job offers, doing tasks which are
sensible and meaningful for someone. Currently probably most of the
fame goes to authors and maintainers. For example in the form of `git
log --author/committer=` or LWN articles about statistics.

How to get more reviews from such people (when employer does not pay
for it)? Give them fame! :)

Best regards,
Krzysztof