Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 12:19:56AM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> I.e. I might propose a a slightly controversial topic, going a bit the 
> other direction than the whole "motivating newcomers" discussion: how to 
> get rid of useless submissions that are slowing maintainers down?
> 
> Should we stop publishing all the statistics? I believe there is no 
> question that those are one of the primary drivers of useless submissions. 
> Once maintainers get DoSed by submissions of wrong and/or useless patches 
> that eat non-negligible amount of their time, we're in trouble.

I don't think it's the statistics that are the primary driver of such
contributions.  Rather, I would suggest that it's so non-trivially
difficult to follow the substantial volume of process needed to get
something into the kernel that it's worth doing a trial run with a
trivial change before trying to do something of substance.

And fixes for certain classes of compiler or sparse warnings have value
themselves.

- Josh Triplett