From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752262AbYE2GJp (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 May 2008 02:09:45 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751165AbYE2GJj (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 May 2008 02:09:39 -0400 Received: from 74-93-104-97-Washington.hfc.comcastbusiness.net ([74.93.104.97]:57496 "EHLO sunset.davemloft.net" rhost-flags-OK-FAIL-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751154AbYE2GJj (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 May 2008 02:09:39 -0400 Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 23:09:34 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <20080528.230934.131215087.davem@davemloft.net> To: James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com Cc: dwmw2@infradead.org, penberg@cs.helsinki.fi, ksummit-2008-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Fixing the Kernel Janitors project From: David Miller In-Reply-To: <1212014127.3445.115.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <1212010931.3445.103.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1212013125.2236.58.camel@shinybook.infradead.org> <1212014127.3445.115.camel@localhost.localdomain> X-Mailer: Mew version 5.2 on Emacs 22.1 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: James Bottomley 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. 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. Consistently we see people turding with whitespace, and not breaking out of that cycle. That is a problem.