"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," began James Bottomley starting a thread titled Fixing the Kernel Janitors project. He continued, "if we wind forwards to 2008, there's considerable and rising friction being generated by janitorial patches,", references a recent thread complaining about worthless patches hitting the lkml. Later in the thread he added:
"That's why I think we have to change the process. If we keep the Janitors project, then the bar has to be raised so that it becomes more participatory and thought oriented (i.e. eliminate from the outset anyone who is not going to graduate from mechanical changes to more useful ones). That's why I think bug finding and reporting is a better thing to do. There are mechanical aspects to finding bugs but it is a useful service. Bug fixing is participatory because we usually do quite a lot of back and forth between the reporter and the fixer and at the end of the day quite a few people get curious about how the bug was triggered in the first place and actually go off and read the code."
"Look at anyone who is extremely nimble with the kernel, and ask them what they worked on to get going with development. Did Andrew Morton fixup whitespace errors when he was starting to become familiar with the tree? Did I? No, none of us did this stuff. We read over the code and learned how it worked, did a port, optimized a lookup algorithm somewhere. Consistently we see people turding with whitespace, and not breaking out of that cycle. That is a problem."
Matt Mackall announced the creation of the Kernel Mentors Project, "an informal project to get experienced developers to mentor new developers and coach them on the best ways to get their code ready for submission." He goes on to explain that the project's mailing list [archive] allows a place for developers to "submit a description of their project and its current state as well as pointers to the code", adding that in response "mentors will pick for themselves which projects and developers they'd like to work with and offer their assistance."
In a posting to the new mailing list, Matt further explained, "the basic idea is matching new kernel developers up with experienced developers so they can get acquainted with existing best practices." He goes on to list some goals for the project, noting that it's not a replacement for the kernel newbies or kernel janitors projects. Instead, he explains that the idea is to smooth out and better document the development process, help merge code that's basically ready for mainline, and to increase overall participation.
Dave Jones currently lives in London, employed by SuSE as a Linux kernel hacker. In the past six months since he graduated from the University of Glamorgan he has gotten involved in an impressive range of kernel related projects, including Powertweak, x86info, OProfile and the Kernel Janitors Project. Additionally, he maintains a -dj patch for the 2.5 development kernel, helping to sync it with the stable 2.4 kernel as well as offering increased stability.
