Happens in CPython as well, I like the term "KPI grabbing". If you complain, the central committee will denounce you as non-inclusive.
Nice that there is still some sanity on LKML.
“Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
81–90 of 277 posts
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#82I 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…
>> 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.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maintainers need their own metrics that are effective, and publish them and work to have partners use them.
I like this idea, but the gamification / rules / meta around it sounds like it would be even more work. And like all metrics it would quickly become a target and... Goodhart's law. This is one of those ideas that I think should totally be a thing, and yet I think wouldn't work and thus shouldn't be a thing.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to define what good work looks like but, simply, whenever maintainers see good work, give that user a golden star.
People will work for the carrot, so give carrots for the work maintainers want to see.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#84I 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…
In general fixing spelling or logging errors are P4 or P5 at best so they should only be fixed if something more important is touching those files. That how I've always viewed it.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#85Without 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.
The context is lack of consideration for people's time.
To use an analogy, imagine you wrote a proposal at work and asked for feedback from your boss. Instead of a single substantive response, they send back a few dozen individual emails, each one a comment on word choice, or font size, or a suggestion for a paragraph break. Even if each one of them might have some minor merit, it was done in the most time wasting way possible, maybe because their boss measures their work output by how many emails they send.
Huawei isn't the kernel boss, but they are essentially submitting feedback. Qu is saying that, for a company the size of Huawei, one that is massively reliant on Linux and has developers' time dedicated to it, he expects them to make their own submissions in a less time wasting fashion. He also suggests the proper way to do it.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#86I 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…
Looks to me like the problem is not the content of the patches, but the way they are submitted as many small patches all from the company. I suspect the maintainers wouldn't be as concerned if all of the contributes were independent (no "@huawei.com" address) or if they bundled the patches together to reduce overhead.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#87Discussion 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.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#88The tone of the email reminds me a lot of Linus Torvald’s brutal code review comments in the google group back then. Can it be said that the “no nonsense” behavior often exhibited by maintainers of Linux kernel could be one of the reason the project grew to become what it is today
Google group? Do you mean LKML? As the name says, it's a mailing list.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#89This is going to become a more common theme. Geopolitics spill into everyday life in all sorts of unexpected ways.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#90Earlier 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.
Yes, so either accept the status quo or create positive change. Given that it’s annoying enough that we have articles and comments on it, perhaps investing maintainers time into developing metrics that work for the maintainers isn’t a terrible idea.
What for? Metrics for metrics sake are a waste of time. The solution is to avoid wasting time on metrics, which is precisely what happened here.