Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [Tech-board-discuss] TAB non-nomination

Jani Nikula
2018-11-13T16:50:02Z

On Sun, 11 Nov 2018, "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> "Community" is a very slippery term. I will note that there were
> *many* people who were participating on the threads, sometimes in very
> non-constructive or in a downright toxic fashion, who had zero commits
> in recent years. In some cases, it was zero commits, *ever*. I
> recall doing the research on one prolific author and found that while
> he did contribute the kernel, it was 3 or 4 commits... ~5 years
> ago... to a driver.
>
> And then there was one person who admitted that while he was just a
> user, he insisted he had a right to weigh in the issue. They
> certainly have the right to have that belief, of course. Whether or
> not maintainers are obliged to cater to people with those beliefs is a
> very different question, however.
>
> There seems to be an assumption that a open, public discussion will
> always give you the best review. I don't think that's necessarily
> true. It can often give you a very biased sample from the poeple who
> are most stridently on one side of the debate or the other, as well as
> being biased towards those who believe in the "last post wins" style
> of debate, since they end up speaking most loudly and posting most
> frequently and most aggressively.

I think it's interesting to note that ksummit-discuss seemed to be a
much more fruitful list for discussion than LKML in this matter. Would
we benefit from a non-technical mailing list to accompany LKML?
Something less "seasonal" than ksummit-discuss.

Could also restrict posting to subscribers only, with public archives,
and limit subscribers to, say, people in MAINTAINERS and/or some (fairly
low) number of required commits in the past years. I presume
ksummit-discuss had fairly good signal-to-noise because it's not well
known or publicized.

BR,
Jani.

--
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center