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“Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

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Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#21

Post by marcinzm »

exdsq wrote: post #15
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #9

I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not. The maintainer even said if someone else sent those patches it would be OK, but not if Huawei employees do it. If they distrust Huawei so much, why not just ban them from committing, the same way they did recently with university "security re…

I guess if you have hundreds of trivial patches it'd take ages to review and merge them, and due to kpis Huawei are being deliberately inefficient

Is this an issue with the workflow that the kernel uses in terms of time spent per patch? In most workflows this seems like it'd take under a minute to review, approve and merge each one although the CI/CD might add some computing cost.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#22

Post by szszrk »

MichaelRazum wrote: post #16
hashhar wrote: post #12

Without any context it looks like someone overreacted. It's essentially saying anybody else than Huawei sending cleanup patches is welcome but Huawei is not. Then they try to backtrack that statement by putting out a long list of things which aren't comparable in complexity to the original topic. Without more context I bet this thread is going to go off-topic.

Sounds like he is saying. Huawei is doing a lot of trivial cleanups to be able to say like they are a major contributor. Basically the argument is: - trivial patches are ok, if you are just doing it for practice. Like a student. - trivial patches are not ok, if you are doing a lot of them and only for the purpose to get a higher contribution ranking (like commits per company)

For me as well. This discussion plus recent 'kernel should use github or similar" articles recently makes me think about sponsors.

Doesn't Kernel use sponsors approach, like Debian used to for packages? You can push anything, but you find yourself a competent maintainer who filters your work. Like puts your trivial commits in bulk ;)

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#23

Post by hundchenkatze »

ma2rten wrote: post #17
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #9

I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not. The maintainer even said if someone else sent those patches it would be OK, but not if Huawei employees do it. If they distrust Huawei so much, why not just ban them from committing, the same way they did recently with university "security re…

These small patches create some overhead for maintainers. He actually said in the follow up message that grouping them together is fine. Please at least merge all those small fixes into a larger patchset, and with a good cover letter to explain the reason (and auto-tool to do the change if possible) for all the involved maintainers, so that all of us are on the same page.

I understand the overhead, but it seems like bundling lots of unrelated cleanup fixes into one large commit would make it easier to sneak in something nefarious.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#24

Post by aritmo »

There is much hostility against Huawei. In the email, the message title was really offensive and even assumed something about KPI, as if the Huawei engineer was inventing patches in order to count as more contributions.

Even the editorialized subject of the post on HN is polemic.

What is this problem with Huawei? It is the US government that is doing the economic war against China and because of that, decided to cripple Huawei.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#25

Post by ThaDood »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #9

I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not. The maintainer even said if someone else sent those patches it would be OK, but not if Huawei employees do it. If they distrust Huawei so much, why not just ban them from committing, the same way they did recently with university "security re…

Right? I am not really sure I see the problem. It seems to me like Huawei is just submitting clean-up patches and the maintainer has higher expectations of what patches they should be submitting. Granted I am not a developer not a maintainer of any project so that might be why it is not obvious.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#26

Post by moftz »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #9

I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not. The maintainer even said if someone else sent those patches it would be OK, but not if Huawei employees do it. If they distrust Huawei so much, why not just ban them from committing, the same way they did recently with university "security re…

Doing as many patches as you can may make the approvers fatigued and more likely to approve something that is bad or malicious.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#28

Post by viraptor »

This happened quite often in openstack too. Since any contributor with a merged change a few months before the annual conference got a free entry ticket, you could see people doing trivial formatting fixes at a certain time of the year.

Similar to the issue with Digital Ocean and Hacktoberfest https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/

People are always going to try to game metrics.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#29

Post by roenxi »

Is there anything going on here that suggests this is not a routine maintenance issue?

The Kernel maintainers have a lot of people who want to submit code to the kernel, and have to maintain standards. I'd imagine there are a lot of emails like this one.

Good on Huawei if they are incentivising open source contributions. Shame on them if they are wasting OSS maintainer time. Presumably well done Qu for promoting some order in a chaotic world.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#30

Post by ridaj »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #9

I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not. The maintainer even said if someone else sent those patches it would be OK, but not if Huawei employees do it. If they distrust Huawei so much, why not just ban them from committing, the same way they did recently with university "security re…

It's not about security. It's about wasting reviewers' time. I too would be annoyed if someone was submitting, say, whitespace-only changes, or similar cleanup, non-functional changes - I still have to review them and my time would be better spent looking at actually meaningful changes that make the product better. It's OK if someone is just learning the ropes with an easy change, but this seems to be more like people trying to game a metric by submitting lots of small changes, which wastes the reviewers' time for no actual user benefit.
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