Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Fixing the Kernel Janitors project | From | David Woodhouse <> | Date | Wed, 28 May 2008 23:49:20 +0300 |
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On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 12:20 -0500, James Bottomley wrote: > In the early days, the project was conceived as a way of getting fresh > blood into kernel development by giving them fairly simple but generally > useful tasks and hoping they'd move more into the mainstream. If we > wind forwards to 2008, there's considerable and rising friction being > generated by janitorial patches. This is only an example: > > http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=121135889328760 > > but there are many more.
The example that sums it up for me is this one:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/5/18/20
We have people making minor cosmetic changes, and not paying even the _slightest_ attention to what they're doing. This one's a particularly scary example because it's something even the most non-technical person should have spotted; there's _no_ excuse. It's the cosmetic equivalent of a naïve warning fix that leaves the actual bug in place.
I think you're right that the status quo is damaging, and I don't see it getting any better with the current quality of 'janitoring'. I think the only way we can salvage anything useful from the janitors project is to keep a close rein on what tasks are actually undertaken.
But we've pushed back on people doing this kind of thing before, and pointed them both at the obvious things they've missed in the context of their patches, and other more useful things they could be doing -- but we've often received responses along the lines of "but I don't want to have to _think_!".
It's hard to know where to go from there, and it's not exactly surprising that we end up frustrated.
-- dwmw2
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