On Wed, 2024-01-17 at 00:54 -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Tue, Jan 16, 2024 at 11:41:25PM -0500, Kent Overstreet wrote: > > > > No, it's a leadership/mentorship thing. > > > > > > > > And this is something that's always been lacking in kernel > > > > culture. Witness the kind of general grousing that goes on at > > > > maintainer summits;maintainers complain about being overworked > > > > and people not stepping up to help with the grungy > > > > responsibilities, while simultaneously we still > > <blah blah blah> > > > > > Tests and test infrastructure fall into the necessary but not > > > > fun category, so they languish. > > > > > > No, they fall into the "no company wants to pay someone to do the > > > work" category, so it doesn't get done. > > > > > > It's not a "leadership" issue, what is the "leadership" supposed > > > to do here, refuse to take any new changes unless someone ponys > > > up and does the infrastructure and testing work first? That's > > > not going to fly, for valid reasons. > > Greg is absolutely right about this. > > > But good tools are important beacuse they affect the rate of > > everyday development; they're a multiplier on the money everone is > > spending on salaries. > > Alas, companies don't see it that way. They take the value that get > from Linux for granted, and they only care about the multipler effect > of their employees salaries (and sometimes not even that). They most > certainly care about the salutary effects on the entire ecosyustem. > At least, I haven't seen any company make funding decisions on that > basis. Actually, this is partly our fault. Companies behave exactly like a selfish contributor does: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/selfish_contributor/ The question they ask is "if I'm putting money into it, what am I getting out of it". If the answer to that is that it benefits everybody, it's basically charity to the entity being asked (and not even properly tax deductible at that), which goes way back behind even real charitable donations (which at least have a publicity benefit) and you don't even get to speak to anyone about it when you go calling with the collecting tin. If you can say it benefits these 5 tasks your current employees are doing, you might have a possible case for the engineering budget (you might get in the door but you'll still be queuing behind every in-plan budget item). The best case is if you can demonstrate some useful for profit contribution it makes to the actual line of business (or better yet could be used to spawn a new line of business), so when you're asking for a tool, it has to be usable outside the narrow confines of the kernel and you need to be able to articulate why it's generally useful (git is a great example, it was designed to solve a kernel specific problem, but not it's in use pretty much everywhere source control is a thing). Somewhere between 2000 and now we seem to have lost our ability to frame the argument in the above terms, because the business quid pro quo argument was what got us money for stuff we needed and the Linux Foundation and the TAB formed, but we're not managing nearly as well now. The environment has hardened against us (we're no longer the new shiny) but that's not the whole explanation. I also have to say, that for all the complaints there's just not any open source pull for test tools (there's no-one who's on a mission to make them better). Demanding that someone else do it is proof of this (if you cared enough you'd do it yourself). That's why all our testing infrastructure is just some random set of scripts that mostly does what I want, because it's the last thing I need to prove the thing I actually care about works. Finally testing infrastructure is how OSDL (the precursor to the Linux foundation) got started and got its initial funding, so corporations have been putting money into it for decades with not much return (and pretty much nothing to show for a unified testing infrastructure ... ten points to the team who can actually name the test infrastructure OSDL produced) and have finally concluded it's not worth it, making it a 10x harder sell now. James
