Re: 463 kernel developers missing!

[Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:46:24 -0400 Dave Jones wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 04:22:36PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
>  > On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 03:00:13PM -0400, Jon Smirl wrote:
>  > > Other people aren't perfect, I've found over 1,000 typos in the those
>  > > names and emails. We need a validation mechanism.
>  > > 
>  > 
>  > You keep using the word "need"; I do not think it means what you think
>  > it does.  :-)
>  > 
>  > Seriously, why is it so important?  It's a nice to have, and I
>  > recognize that you've spent a bunch of time on it.  But if the goal is
>  > to get better statistics, and in exchange we forcibly map all Mark
>  > Browns to one e-mail address, and/or force them to all adopt middle
>  > initials (what if there are two Dan Smith's that don't have middle
>  > initials) just for the convenience of your statistics gathering, I
>  > would gently suggest to you that you've forgotten which is the tail,
>  > and which is the dog.
> 
> I'm beginning to question just how useful the continued measuring
> of things like Signed-off-by's is.   Last week at OLS, I overheard
> a conversation where someone was talking about the "top 10" lists
> that Greg has been talking about at various conferences.
> The conversation went along the lines of "my manager really wants
> to see us on that list, at any cost".
> Whilst the niave may think 'more patches == more better', this isn't
> necessarily the case given we have nowhere near enough review bandwidth
> *now*, and flooding with a zillion trivial patches really isn't going
> to make that job any easier.
> 
> Getting patches into the tree is easy, we've proven that.
> As things stand now, it's also fairly easy to 'game' the system
> by committing something in 10 changesets when it could be done
> just as easily in 2-3.
> 
> How about we start measuring things that actually matter, like..
> 
> "How many patches were reviewed before they went in"
> "How many patches were directly responsible for a bug"
> "How many patches actually fixed something anyone cares about"
> "How many patches are responsible for just 'churn'"

It would be Good if we could give more value to Reviewed-by: tag lines also...

IOW, we "need" to do this.  :)


---
~Randy
Linux Plumbers Conference, 17-19 September 2008, Portland, Oregon USA
http://linuxplumbersconf.org/