Re: Tracking and crediting bug reporters

["Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>]

On Monday, 12 of May 2008, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Several members of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board recently
> got together with Andrew Morton to talk about kernel quality issues.  One
> of the things which came out of that meeting was a desire to improve
> incentives for people who report bugs.  Clearly, actually fixing those bugs
> would qualify; nobody has lost sight of that.  But it was suggested that
> the creation and publication of statistics on bug reporting would also
> help.
> 
> One way to do this might be for Andrew (being the only one who actually
> reads every message posted on the list) to keep a spreadsheet along with
> everything else he does.  That idea did not go over very well.
> 
> So here's what we would like to try instead.  Whenever somebody sends up a
> patch fixing a reported bug, the name of the person who reported the bug
> would be immortalized with this tag:
> 
> 	Reported-by: A. Bug Reporter <email@goes.here>
> 
> In particular, reporters who work with the developers toward the resolution
> of the bug should be thanked in this way.  If we wanted to take things
> further, perhaps we could add a Bisected-by: tag for really hard-core
> helpers. 
> 
> If these tags go into the commit messages in any sort of consistent way, it
> should be possible generate the usual sort of statistics from them.  I'll
> then happily publicize them next to the traditional lists of people who are
> adding new bugs.  The result will certainly be fame, fortune, and job
> offers for the people at the top of the list.  Or something like that.
> 
> If the rest of the community is agreeable, it would be nice to make an
> immediate start on this; it's not yet too late to get reasonable data for
> the 2.6.26 kernel, and to have the habits well ingrained for 2.6.27.
> 
> Thoughts?

I like the idea.

Thanks,
Rafael