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

[Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@lip6.fr>]

On Sat, 11 Jul 2015, Sudip Mukherjee wrote:

> >On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 5:43 AM, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:
> >
> > I applaud your attempt here, and don't want to stop you from working on
> > it, but I think the real issue is having people actually look for the
> > documentation and tools we already have created to do this.  If you make
> > yet-another-tool, how are you going to advertise it any better than the
> > existing tools/documentation are?
> I don't know if i should give my opinion here. I am here for almost one
> year and am coming from Eudyptula. I think this thread was regarding
> recruitment and high dropout rates.
> So from a newbie's point of view, setting up git or mutt was never a
> problem. Ok, maybe everyone needs to send his/her first patch two or
> three itmes until he gets it right in the formating or commit message
> or subject. But sending it using git send-email never had been a problem.
> In my opinion the main problem is lack of direction or guidance. As a
> newbie I send my first patch, it gets accepted, I have a party to
> celebrate and do more style correction and few more patches are accepted.
> But by that time I am getting bored with just style correction and want
> to do something more.
> Now the problem starts. No one is there to guide me and I as a newbie
> will not be that much capable enough to find things to do on my own. And
> I start loosing the interest. Newbies who are coming from Eudyptula or
> starting on their own will face this. But on the otherhand participants
> of Outreachy will get a Mentor to guide them and gets a stipend to keep
> them motivated. Stipend may not matter to the right candidate who has
> interest but having a mentor is the big difference.

This is a good point.  I keep thinking of making a "Stuff I don't like"
blog, which would contain things that I see that look unpleasant, but that
I don't have time to deal with immediately.  This would contain things
that are probably too complicated for checkpatch.  A typical entry might
be a list of functions that could be using devm functions.  Such a thing
could get newbies looking around in the code, seeing how things fit
together, etc.

> Another problem, when a newbie tries to move out of staging to some other
> subsystem he likes, the maintainer may not be that much responsive. Just
> for example, i submitted a patch on November, 2014 and I am yet to receive
> a reply or review to that and the patch was not a style correction patch.

This seems like the sort of problem that has existed since the beginning
of time, and will exist unti the end of time.  One has to just find
something else to do, if the maintainer is completely unresponsive.

julia

> And using git send-email and mutt with gmail is very easy, you do not
> need to do any change in gmail. If you want I can give my .gitconfig
> and .muttrc for your reference.
>
> regards
> sudip
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