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> It's OK for first-time/student developers to submit such patches
Huawei is not being singled out here because huawei or china but because of a specific behavior that's being called out here.
I have worked in team with some kernel developers at Samsung, years ago, so let me put some perspective for those who do not understand the dynamics. In some companies, the amount of patents or Linux kernel patches you get accepted is direct measure of your success. As you know, whatever you measure becomes a target -- these guys feel very pressed to get ANY kernel commits accepted, no matter how small, irrelevant or…
Maintainers need their own metrics that are effective, and publish them and work to have partners use them.
You can totally build something that is a decent metric, but as soon as you create incentives to "game it" (optimize for the metric not the actual goal you're trying to measure), it will be gamed, and creating metrics that are resistant to that is nearly impossible in most cases.
The other problem is a fair number of Eastern managers don't know or care about the business or management details, they all of want the prestige of a title with the least effort. A lot of no-name businesses in China are more BS than corporate ones elsewhere. After-all, why is there such a huge market for white business actors?
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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.
Patch series are an important part of a healthy review workflow because they allow both a micro and a macro view of changes. I have written about this before: http://nhaehnle.blogspot.com/2020/06/they-want-to-be-small-t...
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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?
I agree, I've no idea why it would be at the top of HN. Maybe China-hate?
The committer defends his patch, and Qu responds very constructively with this list of more important work to tackle https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/21/342
PKI measuring just commit count is pretty silly. Like SLOC. Cite folklore.org story of -10,000 lines added.
Whereas Qu's suggestions are useful, important. Am totally ignorant about Linux, kernel, etc. But maybe there's already a leaderboard where the hivemind helps prioritize work.
I have worked in team with some kernel developers at Samsung, years ago, so let me put some perspective for those who do not understand the dynamics. In some companies, the amount of patents or Linux kernel patches you get accepted is direct measure of your success. As you know, whatever you measure becomes a target -- these guys feel very pressed to get ANY kernel commits accepted, no matter how small, irrelevant or…
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…
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>> 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.
They already have subsystem maintainers. The result was an even faster process.
Discussion in Chinese online community zhihu if anyone is interested: https://www.zhihu.com/question/466111598/answer/1951896502
>进git看了一下，笑死了。这位华为大佬曾经在一天里对同一个文件提交了6个fix，每一个fix修改注释里面的一个拼写错误，还有一个是调整include 顺序。被reject了以后还发邮件去defend。打个比方就是你假装帮导师做数据，一个数据没做但是一天发给他6个版本，每个版本改论文里的一个错别字，同时要求导师把你名字加到作者里。导师说求你别给我发了，然后你跑去办公室和他争论这个错字很重要，换了谁都要发飙啊。 https://www.zhihu.com/question/466111598/answer/1953367097 this comment is funny.