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

Post by burnished » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #82

phkahler wrote: post #59

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.

Post by jart » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

acover wrote: post #112

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't work. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." 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.

Edit: Nvm, I misunderstood the initial problem and my solution doesn't address it. Why not just keep commits as a metric, then estimate the quality of those commits by sampling. If the organization appears to be gaming the stats then flag it as such.

Post by faeyanpiraat » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

lmilcin wrote: post #38

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…

Post by exikyut » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

radiator wrote: post #107

lmilcin wrote: post #38

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…

Maybe a panel of maintainers could publish a quarterly review with attribution/thanks to the most important contributors. No metrics to game, only pure human expert opinions.

Post by delroth » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

sdesol wrote: post #111

nneonneo wrote: post #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 particul…

Here is this person's commit history for the last year for additional context: https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=auth... They do appear to contribute regularly enough (relatively speaking) and based on some of the busfactor metrics, they are the sole maintainer or main maintainers for about 50 files. And if you look at their one line change commits, they do seem to be valid: https://public-001.g…