Dear linux kernel janitors and developers. Thank you very much for your effort to the linux kernel development and special thank you to all of you that answered my questions and participated in the questionare. As some of you might remember, I contacted you about writing a masted thesis some time ago (https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/kernel-janitors/2005-October/014300.html). The thesis is available online at http://student.grm.hia.no/master/ikt06/ikt590/g33/report_ikt06_g33.pdf. Should it disappear some time in the future feel free to send me an email to receive a copy. I am sorry for not having written and presented the result to you before now. The perfectionist in me wanted to write a much longer and detailed email than this, but now I just have to send this in order to get this of my chest. To answer my own question from when I first contacted you about if the subject was too little for one person, I have learned that for a master thesis, given a good topic (like I believe it was), there will be always lots of unanswered questions left at the end, so it would not have been a problem working two persons on this. Highlights from the thesis/results of my work: ============================================== A particular interesting finding was the following. The accumulated number of lines added in the unique set of patches that I examined was 29200 lines. The corresponding number of deleted lines was 50561. So this means that the net contribution from the Linux Kernel Janitor Project to the kernel quite clearly is a reduction of code (in addition to making the code more correct and/or more maintainable). Improvement suggestion: Getting new janitors on board is important. If a newcomer is mentored well this will certainly have a positive effect. My suggestion to strengthen this is to always give some feedback on patches submitted by newcomers until they have x patches accepted and included in the kernel. This will also give an initiative for the newcomer to try to achieve "normal" level of being a janitor (maybe they could be called "junior janitor" before this). Best regards Håkon Løvdal -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-janitors" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
