> On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 12:20 -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> > In the early days, the project was conceived as a way of getting fresh
> > blood into kernel development by giving them fairly simple but generally
> > useful tasks and hoping they'd move more into the mainstream. If we
> > wind forwards to 2008, there's considerable and rising friction being
> > generated by janitorial patches. This is only an example:
> >
> >
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=121135889328760
> >
> > but there are many more.
>
> The example that sums it up for me is this one:
>
>
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/5/18/20
>
> We have people making minor cosmetic changes, and not paying even the
> _slightest_ attention to what they're doing. This one's a particularly
> scary example because it's something even the most non-technical person
> should have spotted; there's _no_ excuse. It's the cosmetic equivalent
> of a naïve warning fix that leaves the actual bug in place.
>
> I think you're right that the status quo is damaging, and I don't see it
> getting any better with the current quality of 'janitoring'. I think the
> only way we can salvage anything useful from the janitors project is to
> keep a close rein on what tasks are actually undertaken.
>
> But we've pushed back on people doing this kind of thing before, and
> pointed them both at the obvious things they've missed in the context of
> their patches, and other more useful things they could be doing -- but
> we've often received responses along the lines of "but I don't want to
> have to _think_!".
>
> It's hard to know where to go from there, and it's not exactly
> surprising that we end up frustrated.
