Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Fixing the Kernel Janitors project | From | Peter Zijlstra <> | Date | Thu, 29 May 2008 15:24:10 +0200 |
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On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 23:09 -0700, David Miller wrote: > From: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> > Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 17:35:27 -0500 > > > However, even if there were no recruitment problem at all, getting more > > people involved is always better because it means more contributions. > > This is not true at all. > > If people are getting involved, just for the sake of being involved, > which there is strong evidence of, then it's not a positive thing. > > We want people who are passionate about doing things with the > kernel, are self-motivated, and frankly don't need a ton of hand > holding and do not work on things that require absolutely no > thinking.
I fully agree with this, you need passion and persistence - a will to make a difference.
Also, the kernel is a lot more complex these days than it was like 5 years ago (not that I would know, since I'm not around that long :-), and that just means you just get a better challenge!
Now getting such people is hard, I've been forever trying to get my brother to take up a FOSS project, but the drive seems to be missing. If we find a way to challenge people, to inspire them, that would be good.
> Look at anyone who is extremely nimble with the kernel, and ask them > what they worked on to get going with development. Did Andrew Morton > fixup whitespace errors when he was starting to become familiar with > the tree? Did I? No, none of us did this stuff. We read over the > code and learned how it worked, did a port, optimized a lookup > algorithm somewhere.
I started by rewriting the page reclaim code ;-) you need to start somewhere.
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