On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 01:18:19PM -0700, Greg KH wrote: > On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 10:17:08AM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:49:02 -0700 > > Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxx> 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. > > > > > > While a series of unfortunate events did happen to cause this, do you > > > have any evidence of this causing people to go away? > > > > Subjectively the answer is yes I think. More quantatively it was the case. > > I did some measurements long ago with 2.4-ac and there was direct and > > clear connection between two things and patch submission/activity levels. > > One was 'cycle time' (ie time from submit->response->tree) - the other was > > putting the name of the contributor in the per -ac patch summaries that > > used to get mailed out. > > Yeah, I know I liked seeing my name there, that was very nice to have :) For this exact reason, I pay a lot of attention to credit the people who contribute some work, even if I have to adapt it afterwards. I've long observed that doing this is essential if you want to see them come again with some nice work. Concerning the delay, it's even a tunable. When I took over 2.4, I did not realize that being too much reactive to mails became an incitation for submitters to send many many things. After some time (primarily due to lack of time), I started to work by batches and I noticed that the submission rates dramatically dropped. So I totally agree with Alan here. BTW Greg, I too remember the time when a buddy was excited to forward to me an announce from Alan where my name was cited :-) Regards, Willy _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
