On Jan 4, 2008 8:41 PM, Andi Kleen <andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: [...] > > I don't know, because people want to be able to say that they've > > contributed fixes to the Linux kernel? > > My pet theory is that it is similar to the "unsubscribe me" > cascade effect you sometimes see on mailing lists. One person > sends a "unsubscribe me" to everybody and then suddenly a lot of > people think that is the right way to unsubscribe and reply > with lots of "unsubscribe me too". > > So one person sends a cleanup and it gets accepted and suddenly > other people realize it is very easy to do these cleanups > (not realizing the hidden costs they have) and then they go on... Since I'm one of those people that sent "Codying style fixes" patches I give my contribution to this discussion as well. I think that _one_ of the reasons that made a few people sent this kind of patches to the list is because checkpatch.pl is far better then any other kerneljanitor scripts/easy task and _seems_ to be an easy way to start understanding the code, creation of patches and process in general. > I thought we had the janitor project to steer these people into > more useful directions, but apparently that is not well known > enough anymore. Perhaps it just needs to be more regularly announced? > > Although I must admit I am not 100% happy with kernel-janitors > either -- e.g. a few times I sent suggestions about easy things > someone could do to that list, but never heard anything back. > > Anyways there are lots of ways to do trivial cleanups in a useful > way and if people want to do this perhaps they should just > ask on linux-kernel and people suggest something? Yes please do that. Even if fixing errors reported by checkpatch.pl still sounds like a useful way to spent a couple of hours. Maybe our mistake was to send the patches to lkml instead of to trivial@xxxxxxxxxx or to kerneljanitors? I mean, I now understand the rationales behind your complaints but I don't think it's good idea to discourage people willing to perform easy task. They just need guidance in order to be useful. > My hope here is of course that these trivial changes are primarily > used as a way to get "the feet wet" to understand the procedures > for contribuing larger not quite as trivial changes Agreed. ciao, -- Paolo http://paolo.ciarrocchi.googlepages.com/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
