On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 10:26:24PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 12:42:48AM -0700, Greg KH wrote: > > Rather, what concerns me is that we aren't pushing people to go > *beyond* cleanup patches. We have lots of tutorials about how to > create perfectly formed patches; but we don't seem to have patches > about how to do proper benchmarking. Or how to check system call and > ioctl interfaces to make sure the code is doing appropriate input > checking. So I don't want to pre-reject these people; but to rather > push them and to help them to try their hand at more substantive work. > > What surprises me is the apparent assumption that people need a huge > amount of hand-holding on how to properly form a patch, but that > people will be able to figure out how to do proper benchmarking, or > design proper abstractions, etc., as skills that will magically appear > full-formed into the new kernel programmer's mind without any help or > work on our part. Reading Ted's earlier mail I was thinking since I don't have some of the skills mentioned, maybe I am in wrong place. But what Ted said now is almost the same what I said in the Ksummit discussion about recruitment. I will copy-paste here for reference: "In my opinion the main problem is lack of direction or guidance. As a newbie I send my first patch, it gets accepted, I have a party to celebrate and do more style correction and few more patches are accepted. But by that time I am getting bored with just style correction and want to do something more. Now the problem starts. No one is there to guide me and I as a newbie will not be that much capable enough to find things to do on my own. And I start loosing the interest. Newbies who are coming from Eudyptula or starting on their own will face this. But on the otherhand participants of Outreachy will get a Mentor to guide them and gets a stipend to keep them motivated. Stipend may not matter to the right candidate who has interest but having a mentor is the big difference." This is from my own experience as I have gone through that time phrase. But now after one year I know there are numerous things to do. But still I don't have some of the skills Ted mentioned. I know I will get the skills which I don't have now but since I am on my own that will be a time consuming process. Even more time consuming as this is not part of my dayjob. But if I had a mentor/guide who could have given some hint the process might have been much much faster. regards sudip -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
