“Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches” • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by Aperocky » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

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...

Your post are downvoted because it is borderline racist.

The maintainer happened to be Chinese and that gave you 'chills'. There are 1.4 billion Chinese and most of them live in China, there are also open source projects hosted in China, and a lot of open source contribution coming from people living in China, if only because there are many people there. The media links you posted are also made of conjecture ('Trump administration claims' is literally in the title) and you've then stretched them with your own imagination to arrive at your 'concerns'.

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

#152

Post by everybodyknows » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:21 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.

Maintainers aren’t interested in taking on extra chores. However, important contributors already do receive attribution, in the format of news articles, here:

https://lwn.net/Archives/

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

#153

Post by cjohansson » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:26 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…

Sounds like the typical issue of business intelligence using quantity over quality to rate work performance

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

#154

Post by a-and » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

It's unfortunate since ideally any contribution is a good contribution, but the Linux kernel has been so highly dependent on maintainers, that them being highly protective of their time is totally warranted.

As someone who works at a big corp with regular OSS contributions, this doesn't surprise me at all. Recently a "Look at how amazing we are" e-mail was sent out to my team touting the number of PRs submitted to a widely-used OSS project.

If your management incentivizes it, you'll try to game the system.

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

#155

Post by fao_ » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

lmilcin wrote: post #148

otikik wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neve…

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

Wasn't the other person doing exactly the same, just on the "pro-asshole" side of the argument?

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

#156

Post by h_anna_h » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

Remember when they tried to push a backdoor into the kernel last year? I am surprised with how they kept allowing them to submit patches. They acted much more boldly with the issue with the university of Minnesota.

I am not a grsec fan but here https://grsecurity.net/huawei_hksp_introduces_trivially_expl...

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

#157

Post by theli0nheart » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

da39a3ee wrote: post #48

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…

When people make trivial typo PRs on my open source projects I say thanks very much, close their PR, and make the change in a commit under my name. This way, if their interest is in improving the project then it worked. And if their interest is in contributions then it works also because it doesn't pollute their contribution history with trivial changes that aren't real contributions.

That’s incredibly disrespectful. With that approach, I would be shocked if anyone would want to contribute to your project again after such behavior.

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

#158

Post by TimWolla » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

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…

> they tried to fix "borken" to "broken" and the maintainer was not happy […] 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

I did not know "borken" either, but I am aware of "borked" and "broken". Based on that email thread someone else already attempted to fix this in the past.

Maybe it's an indication that the so-called "joke" is not actually funny and it should be adjusted to either "borked" or "broken" to not cause others to send the same fix?

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

#159

Post by Nexxxeh » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

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

Thanks for posting this. I had initially wondered how, if not through this process, you were supposed to fix minor stuff like comments and error messages.

>I'm not saying cleanup is not important, in fact we have routinely cleanups of typos/grammar for btrfs. (And I guess mostly caused by myself?)

>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.

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

#160

Post by yebyen » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

fao_ wrote: post #155

lmilcin wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neve…

> It is naive to claim you can tell which part of Linus is and which isn't contributing to the success. Wasn't the other person doing exactly the same, just on the "pro-asshole" side of the argument?

It is probably easier and more defensible to look at a thing that is, and say "why is it this way" than to see something that isn't and ask, "why isn't it the way I want it to be?"

These are logically not the same structure of argument. I'm not making any character judgements about people involved in this discussion, or on the LKML either for that matter.