Re: Linux 2.6.21

Andrew Morton
2007-04-29T03:04:38Z

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 08:11:30 +1000 Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de> wrote:

> On Saturday April 28, mbligh@mbligh.org wrote:
> >
> > Yes, human involvement from someone with half a brain would be better.
> > Andrew does a lot of that. Not a particularly good use of talent really.
> > but still.
>
> I think more than half a brain is needed to do this well. You need a
> reasonable understanding of how all the bits of the kernel work
> together so that you have a good chance of sending the bug in the right
> direction. You need a good understanding of the kernel community and
> various sub communities so that you know who might be both able and
> willing to deal with the bug. And it wouldn't hurt to have a good
> over-view of the current 'hot' areas of the kernel so you know if it
> is really worth suggesting "try with the latest -mm" or not.
> And you need good people skills.
>
> So I think you really need a lot of up-to-date knowledge to do this
> well. Because of Andrew's position as a funnel, he has a lot of that
> knowledge.

yup

> It would be really nice if he had some help though.

Amen, Brother Neil.

> And I
> really think that would mean finding someone in the community who
> would rather be coding (and currently are) and convincing them that
> there is a higher calling for them. Finding someone out side or on
> the edge of the community is less likely to be effective.

http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=53317

This is a fully funded regular full-time position @google's Mountain View
HQ, sitting within nagging range of myself, doing precisely what you
describe.

Unfortunately the recruiting has been a bit tricky - this is not a typical
job and it's a funny mixture of bureaucracy/politics/social engineering
and programming. People who are skilled in both areas, are, ah, uncommon.
But it will happen eventually.

Meanwhile I

- ensure that all bugzilla reports are routed to the relevant maintainer

- ensure that all those who reported bugs via email are later asked to
raise bugzilla reports if it didn't get fixed (but I only monitor one list!)

- continue to file away all the real-looking bugzillas with the intention
of generating aggregated reports, but you know how it is.