On 4/22/2010 7:55 AM, Joe Perches wrote: > On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 22:49 -0700, Greg KH wrote: >> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 09:25:57PM -0700, Joe Perches wrote: >> > On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 20:45 -0700, Greg KH wrote: >> > > That caused the huge backlog staring at me right now. >> > Which likely discouraged the new contributors who >> > submitted stuff still in that backlog. >> do you have any evidence of this causing people to go away? > > I think it's pretty established that response delays > cause losses of one type or another. Perhaps, perhaps not. OTOH, the development process documentation contains the advice not to be discouraged if feedback isn't immediate, and if in doubt, simply resubmit sometime later. http://lxr.linux.no/#linux-old+v2.4.0/Documentation/SubmittingPatches#L180 I.e. it is well known that delays may happen and that people should not worry about them. If people /do/ get discouraged nevertheless, then this is because they do not want or cannot afford to spend the (little) time to resubmit or just ask what the review progress is. If this happened to a bug fix of an existing feature, than that is sad and our loss. But if this happened to a patch that is meant to develop a new feature --- such as fundamentally all patches to drivers/staging/ --- then there is not any real loss of a potential contributor, IMO: Mid-term or long-term contributors need to be people who work with the reviewers and maintainers, and that means to cope with occasional delays. Of course, if there is a subsystem with _permanent_ huge delays or actual patch loss or is orphaned entirely, then somebody needs to step in and offer help with review (which is a hard task and only worthwhile if the volunteering reviewer is credible) and perhaps with maintenance duties (which is easier). -- Stefan Richter -=====-==-=- -=-- =-==- http://arcgraph.de/sr/ _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
