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

Laurent Pinchart
2018-11-13T19:59:40Z

Hi Jani,

On Tuesday, 13 November 2018 18:49:58 EET Jani Nikula wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Nov 2018, "Theodore Y. Ts'o" 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.

Or could it be because the list is less known by the general public, and thus
not as targeted by trolls ? Maybe I'm being overly negative there, a new
mailing list might help. We would need to make sure to get people to subscribe
(yet another mailing list...), but on the other hand the much lower traffic
compared to LKML might help regain people who are not subscribed to or just
don't read LKML.

> 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.

Limiting subscription to MAINTAINERS would in my opinion keep out too many
people with a real interest and useful feedback to provide. Limiting it to
contributors would be better, even if possibly too limiting. We could
experiment with that though and see how it works out.

In any case, if we want to restrict list subscription (or at least post
rights) to kernel community members, we will need to answer the elephant in
the room question: who is the kernel community ?

> I presume ksummit-discuss had fairly good signal-to-noise because it's not
> well known or publicized.

I should have read your whole e-mail before writing the reply :-)

--
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart