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

[Tim Bird <tim.bird@sonymobile.com>]

On 07/16/2015 09:16 AM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jul 2015 09:09:35 -0700
> Tim Bird <tim.bird@sonymobile.com> wrote:
> 
>> Here's just an anecdote to support this.  There's a highly qualified 
>> developer at Sony I was talking to this week, who said that when he
>> sees a bug in the mainline kernel, he usually just ignores it because
>> the hassle-factor of submitting a patch is too high.
> 
> Ouch! But that's still no excuse to ignore it. There should be no
> hassle factor in reporting a bug. Sending a patch along with it is a
> plus. It at least demonstrates what is wrong. Now it may be a different
> matter if you want your patch to make it into the kernel.
> 
> I've sent hundreds of patches to different subsystem maintainers (and
> even Linus), where the patch was mostly used to show where the bug was,
> and my version of the fix, but the final fix was authored by someone
> else with just a Reported-by contributed to me. I'm fine with that, but
> others may not be.
> 
> I heard that IBM once had a method where if you submitted a change, and
> that change made it into kernel, even if the final change was not
> authored by you, you still got credit for it. That's a fabulous way of
> looking at contributions and giving credit to your employees.

That's really good feedback.  I've often assumed that if you saw something
that needed fixing, you had a responsibility to properly format a patch
so as not to burden the maintainer.  I've labeled my own "best-effort,
but-probably-not-mainlinable" patches as [RFC PATCH..].  Would it be
worth having a convention for that sort of thing?

In other contexts, there have been suggestions that even known-to-be-unnacceptable
patches be submitted to lkml, just so there's a public record of some driver,
feature extension or workaround, that people can evaluate or fix up later.
What do people think of this (if they were marked as such)?
 -- Tim