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

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91–100 of 277 posts

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

#91
post #30

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 peopl…

I think there was some medium post by a guru where he claimed the best way to get experience was to submit as many spelling error pull request as possible. That way he can throw in his resume that he's contributed to a dozen or so open source projects. Given how broken the hiring process is, it wouldn't surprise me if this works

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

#92
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not nefarious , it's a pattern of a particular company trying to game a metric, to boost their reputation. Pretend you were a dev, and your effectiveness was mostly described within your 500-engineer department in terms of "how many pull-requests" you merged each month. In the abstract, that seems like a reasonable metric to use - it does seem to correlate with actual output, and encourages smaller slicing (whic…

This looks boring. This is a scene that plays out in every company weekly. The stakes are trivial, there is no evidence of ill intent anywhere. Nobody has done anything particularly badly behaved. Nothing here is a shining example of good behaviour. There isn't a feel-good aspect. I suppose the question is, who are the 100+ people who upvoted this, and why?

It was good clickbait. The title made me think something similar to the recent security issue with the University of Minnesota[1] was happening again, but from Huawei this time

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670

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

#93
The fellow who is being named in this particular PR has been _quite_ busy lately, submitting mostly typo fixes and whitespace fixes: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=f%3Athunder.leizhen

Sometimes their patches aren't even valid - they tried to fix "borken" to "broken" and the maintainer was not happy: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YK3wOkX6I78j73zD@gmail.com/ (this does come down to not being familiar with this particular bit of slang - but they push back and argue a bit which doesn't help)

Sometimes the maintainers are not happy just getting a patch that fixes one line of whitespace: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210608105943.2376328c@oasis.l...

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

#94
post #56

> already broken reputation. What's that "broken reputation"? Apart from the media circus about 5G. Anything that Huawei has done wrong related to the Linux kernel or the open source community generally speaking?

Hey, give this maintainer a break! Can't trumpists work in the kernel?

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

#95
post #71

Discussion in Chinese online community zhihu if anyone is interested: https://www.zhihu.com/question/466111598/answer/1951896502

To save English speakers a couple of clicks to translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http...

Keep in mind this community is probably censored:

https://qz.com/1063073/in-china-you-now-have-to-provide-your...

From the online translation, the mention by one the commentators that the Kernel Maintainer is also Chinese...give me a bit of a chill...

To make it clear ...Not that I would not trust the maintainer, instead, my concern is that depending where he is based a window could be open to unpleasant pressure...

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

#96

The sense I got from the post was: "It's fine for noobs to cut their teeth on small issues, but as one of the largest tech companies, I'd expect more from your commits. It's obvious you're not even trying".

I agree with this. It's reasonable to expect more from well-paid professionals.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. My best guess: It creates a small amount of work for a maintainer to review and merge. This is worthwhile if a new contributor is learning their way around, and getting new contributors is very important to an OSS project. To have a large…

It's true that it creates an overhead for maintainers. But, on the other hand, maybe Linux process needs to be improved to relief the maintainers from having to review every single patch. Linux as a project is big enough, and if maintainers are the bottleneck, maybe it's time to have sub-maintainers to whom such tasks could be delegated.

See, this will just cause additional communication overhead for the maintainers, too. And for what benefit, just to accommodate the behavior we see here?

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

#98
post #91
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

I think there was some medium post by a guru where he claimed the best way to get experience was to submit as many spelling error pull request as possible. That way he can throw in his resume that he's contributed to a dozen or so open source projects. Given how broken the hiring process is, it wouldn't surprise me if this works

Ugh. Next thing we’ll see is a LinkedIn widget on your profile page showing how many projects you’ve committed to.

I know GitHub does something like this already, but GitHub is more techie sharing, and LinkedIn is more about bragging based o what I see.

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

#100
post #91
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

I think there was some medium post by a guru where he claimed the best way to get experience was to submit as many spelling error pull request as possible. That way he can throw in his resume that he's contributed to a dozen or so open source projects. Given how broken the hiring process is, it wouldn't surprise me if this works

That sounds more like fabricating experience than getting experience.
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