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

[Tim Bird <tim.bird@sonymobile.com>]

On 07/16/2015 08:12 AM, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 08:04:30AM -0700, Tim Bird wrote:
> 
>> On 07/16/2015 06:47 AM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>>> One of the issues with newcomers coming to development of the Linux
>>> kernel, is that every maintainer is different. We should be trying
>>> harder to let people know what we prefer. Every maintainer expects
>>> something different, but it's up to the maintainer to explicitly let
>>> others know what they want. You can't expect everyone to read your mind.
>>
>> I agree with this completely.  When you switch systems (which I've done
>> something like 5 times in the last 2 years), you are essentially a newbie
>> in that new system.
>>
>> How about putting some notes in the MAINTAINER file for things like
>> this, that some get_maintainer.pl option could show? 
>> We could use a I: prefix, for "Instructions:"  (only because 'N:'
>> is already used.)
>>
>> I'm not sure the what types of per-maintainer differences would be good to
>> list, but at least the two described here would be good:
>>  - ping delay preference
>>  - ping style (whole patch or just an alert) preference
>>
>> I think there may be some other things that we could recommend, but maybe
>> it would be good to use free-form instructions for a while and see what
>> patterns emerge.
>>
>> A side benefit of this would be that maintainers could see what their
>> colleagues are doing, which might help spread knowledge of useful
>> practices.
> 
> Haven't systems like patchwork mostly obsoleted ping emails?

$ grep ^[A-Z][^:] MAINTAINERS | wc -l
1389
$ grep ^Q: MAINTAINERS | wc -l
102

I think it's safe to say that less than 10% of sub-systems use
patchwork (or at least are documented to use patchwork).
 -- Tim