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

lkml.org

271–277 of 277 posts

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

#271
post #247
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corollary: "Businesses that base their growth on A/B testing only, turn into gambling or pornography".

Relevant xkcd: "Video Content" https://xkcd.com/1804/ A/B and telemetry-worship reminds me of something I posted on Fedi earlier. Pasting it below: --- "Guys, I have an idea. Let's make a browser optimized for the kind of people who don't opt out of telemetry, and market it to privacy-conscious people." -- Top minds at Mozilla Corp If you market to privacy-conscious people and you base all your decisions on data from…

This is enlightening and depressing. It's sad to see the Fox let itself go.

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

#272
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, what? The degree to which a metric is directly tied to incentives absolutely impacts how much that metric will be gamed. It is not trite at all to caution that metrics that are critical to understanding your business should remain as decoupled as possible from incentives. This allows you to maintain the quality of the signals your metrics provide. This isn't just theory. This is precisely why there are laws that…

So tell me this: how is the degree to which a given metric is tied to incentives meant to be varied? > This is precisely why there are laws that prohibit rewarding people based on how they voted. Voting is not an evaluation method of the voter: the voter is the one doing the evaluating. Because the powers should not discriminate between voters as you say, the vote cannot be used to evaluate the voters on and individu…

> So tell me this: how is the degree to which a given metric is tied to incentives meant to be varied?

...by not tieing incentives to it? I feel like I must not understand your question because this seems blindingly obvious...

> Voting is not an evaluation method of the voter: the voter is the one doing the evaluating. Because the powers should not discriminate between voters as you say, the vote cannot be used to evaluate the voters on and individual basis at all.

I don't even get where you got this strawman from.

> no individual/team assessments of any sort. That makes no incentives. But that also doesn't help with fine-grained strategy.

No, just dont use KPIs that are critical to understanding your business in assessments tied to incentices because that will distort your KPIs and make you less capable of understanding your business.

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

#273
post #214
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have pointed out, that's speculation. I have trouble understanding why it bothers people so much that Linus is rude sometimes. You don't have to interact with him if you don't want. You can even contribute to the kernel without interacting with him. Whatever he's been doing has been working for going on 3 decades now, I don't see a burning need to change it because it bothers some outsiders. There's this we…

The main problem for me is the old "fish rots from the head down" effect -- when the rude and entitled behavior comes directly from the top, it's no surprise when everyone else starts acting like that and gets at each other's throats. It should be obvious by now where this weird sense of entitlement and refusal to understand other people's culture is coming from. >feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project…

So the LKML has been rotting from the head down for...30 years? If the result of that is Linux, maybe the rot isn't as bad as you fear.

The cultural differences that cause distro forks are debates over free-vs-libre, what belongs in the kernel vs userspace, and standardization issues, not (afaik) "we won't submit this to the upstream kernel because we don't approve of the way they talk to each other there". And I think it's very important for the core kernel devs to hold the line on those issues.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I dunno why you needed a citation for this it is literally the NSA's job to do this, if you weren't just trolling me you must be living under a rock.

https://www.wired.com/2014/04/nsa-exploited-heartbleed-two-y...

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, you missed my point. I'm talking about people who tour around GitHub making PRs comprising a single letter typo charge in order to bolster their contribution statistics. For example the last one I got was changing Github to GitHub in one location. I have no time for that whatsoever. I'm otherwise an extremely friendly and respectful maintainer, including with beginners, of course, and my project has various repeat contributors; I'm sorry I can't point you to it to convince you of that. Your comment is a misjudgment.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's easy to feel it's disrespectful because they've made social networks out of contributing to repositories. Accreditation for the modification of petty and trivial issues is a nice and decent gesture, but overall unworthy of a paper trail binding me to any random none-of-my-business project for such a drive-by PR. Personally, I would feel more comfortable sending that kind of inane PRs if the parent's way of…

> Accreditation for the modification of petty and trivial issues is a nice and decent gesture, but overall unworthy of a paper trail binding me to any random none-of-my-business project for such a drive-by PR. I don't know about others, but before investing significant time in a project, my first action will be to read through the documentation, then the code (and accompanying comments), and then I'll make minor fixe…

I was referring to a PR which literally changed a single letter :) Not a meaningful piece of proof-reading work.
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