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 047E7BB3 for ; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 01:49:24 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mx2.suse.de (cantor2.suse.de [195.135.220.15]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id E1FC2175 for ; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 01:49:22 +0000 (UTC) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2015 11:49:13 +1000 From: NeilBrown To: Josh Boyer Message-ID: <20150708114913.4ef9e517@noble> In-Reply-To: References: <201507080121.41463.PeterHuewe@gmx.de> <1481488.5WJFbB0Dlm@vostro.rjw.lan> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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, 7 Jul 2015 21:14:00 -0400 Josh Boyer wrote: > 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. Nah, you need carrots, not sticks. And that really comes down to time and/or money. As the original post quoted: > Subsystem maintainership is also, increasingly, not a job for > volunteer developers.." In academia, there is a "sabbatical" system (or there was - at some Unis) where an academic could take 6 months or a year off to go and do something else: visit another institution - do some new research or new sort of teaching. Would you like a 6-month secondment to the Linux Foundation to be spent reviewing patches? I think I would... It would undoubtedly be a challenge to organise and to fund. But this issue has been ongoing and unanswered for so long that it seems likely that a radical change is required. NeilBrown > 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 > _______________________________________________ > Ksummit-discuss mailing list > Ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ksummit-discuss