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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”

#141

Post by markus_zhang »

belter wrote: post #132
markus_zhang wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah real identity has been going on for a while and recently I had to submit my id number too but I don't think it affects most of the discussion on Zhihu as long as it's not too politically sensitive. It's an annoyance for many people in oversea though.

As I am not a Chinese speaker..do you confirm there is in the thread a comment that the maintainer is also Chinese ? I am concerned about possible pressure from Huawei and its "shareholders": https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53172057 to a Kernel maintainer. Looking at the heavy down votes my post got its not a concern here...

Yeah one reply says so. The name is Qu Wenruo (definitely a Chinese name) and his github repo is at: https://github.com/adam900710

From the email it looks like he works/worked in SUSE.

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

#142

Post by joelkevinjones »

LLVM has quite a number of people who have "review after commit" privilege. These are people who are trusted to know the difference between changes needing review and those that don't. As a result, people can fix typos, fix formatting, etc. without burdening reviewers. Those sorts of changes don't go through the usual review process, but on occasion may be reverted, by either the committer or someone else who has commit privilege.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

dangerface wrote: post #58
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.

I think the missing context is that Huawei is one of the largest technology companies in the world, every thing they do is built on linux, improving it would improve their business but their contribution to the project is a spell checker. Ok but clearly not their finest work. NSA has implemented backdoors in software through bug fixes that appear to be just benign typo or spelling fixes but actually allow an exploit…

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by ptrkmhms »

dangerface wrote: post #58
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.

I think the missing context is that Huawei is one of the largest technology companies in the world, every thing they do is built on linux, improving it would improve their business but their contribution to the project is a spell checker. Ok but clearly not their finest work. NSA has implemented backdoors in software through bug fixes that appear to be just benign typo or spelling fixes but actually allow an exploit…

[Citation needed]

>NSA has implemented backdoors in software through bug fixes that appear to be just benign typo or spelling fixes but actually allow an exploit in combination with some other exploit etc.

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

#145

Post by lmilcin »

qsmlfkqjsd wrote: post #119
lmilcin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that creating objective measure of contribution value is just unfeasible if at all possible. Not to mention amount of work required which is exactly the issue. But mostly, maintainers want to just focus on their work and not be bothered by corporations and their developers trying to game the system just to prop up their position.

> The issue is that creating objective measure of contribution value is just unfeasible if at all possible. Could you give an example of a non trivial patch which value would be unfeasible to assess objectively? I am not familiar enough with the maintenance process to understand how hard it is to measure objectively the quality of a patch.

It is not about any single patch, you can't assess value of any patch objectively.

For starters there isn't even an objectively established definition of value. You can't objectively measure something that only has subjective definitions.

In a free market you could say that the price could be proxy for the value (ie how much somebody can pay for it should at least theoretically correspond to its value for that person). But how you do that for an open source project?

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

#146

Post by moonshinefe »

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…

Thanks for your perspective I didn't actually realize that dynamic was at play (at an organizational level, anyway, I'm well aware individuals game # of contributions).

These organizations pushing trivial/garbage patches and wasting maintainers' time absolutely have to be called out by the community as unacceptable, so I'm glad to see the post. This is a massive waste of time, time which open source contributors/maintainers often are already short on.

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

#147

Post by iicc »

specialist wrote: post #106
wwarner wrote: post #20

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

Can we measure "impact" of changes? 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.

A measure of the ratio of patch effort to review effort (as subjectively judged by the reviewer, perhaps to the nearest order of magnitude) might be informative.

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

#148

Post by lmilcin »

otikik wrote: post #138
wyager wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why ousting Linus puts the long-term health of the kernel at risk. It’s very difficult and expensive, at a personal and professional level, to tell colleagues to “fuck off” if they are submitting low quality garbage for reasons related to their salary. Linux was Linus’s baby, he had nearly absolute control, and he didn’t care too much about politeness - this was a magic recipe for him to be able to stave off…

I think the email was completely effective in denouncing a behavior. Telling people to "fuck off" isn't required (nor desired, in my opinion). Linux health happened *despite* Linus' manners, not because of them.

It is naive to claim you can tell which part of Linus is and which isn't contributing to the success.

For one, I think it might be possible Linus's no-nonsense attitude is for the better of the organization as people who can't work with it are leaving causing Linux developers, on average, to be more no-nonsense and also able to coexist better with other no-nonsense people.

But, it is my conjecture only. We would never know how Linux would fare if Linus was another guy.

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

#149

Post by squiggleblaz »

wwarner wrote: post #20

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

That was a shockingly productive and constructive resolution.

Are we doing Hacker News wrong? Should we have a system to encourage models of good and productive interchanges, which leave the participants happy and the product better? I think hostility is easier but I guess it's also addictive, even for us.

I don't want to be shocked by seeing this. I want to see more of this.

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

#150

Post by shkkmo »

Clewza313 wrote: post #137
lmilcin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KPIs are not a shit system, they are actually important to running any nontrivial organization. The issue isn't whether KPIs are good or bad but what you do with them. KPIs don't need to be tied to actual people, usually they are tied to teams, systems, projects, processes, etc. For example, a number of users resigning from our services might be a KPI. KPIs are an important tool to understand what is going on and whe…

Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Humans are extremely good at gaming KPIs, and will do so as long as they're rewarded for it.

Which would indicate that the issue is not using KPIs to understand how your business is performing, but providing incentives based on KPIs.
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