[ANNOUNCE] The Janitor Project

[ANNOUNCE] The Janitor Project

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

Hi,

The Kernel Janitor's Project grew out of our search for things to help in
the development of the Linux kernel, and learning from other patches
submitted by more experienced people, we saw that some of these patches
indicated error patterns that could exist in other parts of the kernel, we
looked and... yes, we discovered that some parts of the kernel suffered
from the same problems and in the process we found code bitrotting...

I (acme) started maintaining a TODO list for things to fix or clean up and
people started submitting suggestions for things to fix that I collected at
http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~acme/TODO, looking at the httpd logs I
discovered that _lots_ of people accessed it, so this indeed was something
useful as a starting point for people also wanting to help in cleaning
up/fixing parts of the kernel.

Now we're expanding this so that this continues to be useful, hosting it at
sourceforge to make possible for other people to include more things to
clean/fix.

So, get your broom and start cleaning! 8)

regards,

The kernel-Janitor team.

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One anouncement is not enough, so here's another one 8)
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The kernel janitor project has been created at
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/kernel-janitor

Acme's TODO list is now held there in CVS, and there are also mailing lists
announcing new addtions, and another for discussion.

This project does not replace, but instead compliments the existing janitor
list maintained by Acme.  By keeping this in CVS with multiple maintainers,
updates will happen more frequently.

The mailing list will contain many discussions of patches fixing problems
on the TODO, and also explanations of how these things can be fixed.

regards,

The kernel-Janitor team.
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And yes, the Stanford team work is helping to make the TODO bigger 8)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The Janitor Project

[Werner Almesberger]

Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
> http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~acme/TODO

BTW, I don't know if you're already interacting, but it seems to me that
there are a lot of things on your list that look as if the MC project at
Stanford ("CHECKER") could provide automated tests for them.

- Werner

-- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH           Werner.Almesberger@epfl.ch /
/_IN_N_032__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/

Re: [ANNOUNCE] The Janitor Project

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

Em Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 10:43:21AM +0200, Werner Almesberger escreveu:
> Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
> > http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~acme/TODO
> 
> BTW, I don't know if you're already interacting, but it seems to me that
> there are a lot of things on your list that look as if the MC project at
> Stanford ("CHECKER") could provide automated tests for them.

Yup, there has been some interaction in the past and I suggest that the
Stanford CHECKER people be subscribed to the kernel-janitors list or the
other way around, so that we can work more closely.

One thing is to find error patterns, and this is being done by the janitor
team and by any other interested people, other point is to go thru the
kernel sources and see where the patterns appear, and here the CHECKER is a
very important player if not the most important, and the other is to fix
the problems found, where active maintainers should do the work, despite
the fact that some are supposedly maintained (listed in MAINTAINERS or in
the kernel sources) some aren't, there are even drivers listed as
maintained but the maintainers don't even have the hardware anymore, and
new maintainers should appear or the janitors should do the work.

- Arnaldo