Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Fixing the Kernel Janitors project

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

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.