Re: [RFC patch] MAINTAINERS: encourage testers to volunteer

[Jiri Slaby <jirislaby@gmail.com>]

Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 01:14:24PM -0600, Jim Cromie wrote:
> > Add a new entry-type into MAINTAINERS whereby folks with hardware can 
> > volunteer to
> > test patches to the driver.  It should encourage folks to put themselves 
> > "on the hook"
> > in trade for a little bit of notoriety.
> >
> > Hopefully this will help improve:
> > - support for rare hardware
> > - QA on that hardware
> > - connections between hackers & testers
> > - would-be hackers can find new things to do, esp in less visited parts 
> > of the dist.
> >
> > Additions should be approved by maintainers etc, but thats no different 
> > than is currently done.
>
> There are currently 97 different saa7134 card types supported by the 
> kernel. Do we need an entry for each of them (each card type has it's 
> own specific support)?

It's utterly sufficient to know about only one person, who have that piece of 
hardware in most cases -- to test the core of the driver, not all specific 
parts. Something like to test it at least roughly.

> And this information will become outdated much faster than updated
> (even the maintainers entries are sometimes outdated).

When akpm proposed this, I agreed (but still have no contacts to post a patch), 
because I needed somebody to test a driver I had rewritten a little bit, but 
there was no place to take a look...
But his thoughts were a little bit different, he considered creating a separate 
file named TESTERS and there have a list of these "qa people" (even for one 
specific piece of hw if necessary). [I hope I did understand him correctly...]

> > --- doc-touches/MAINTAINERS~	2006-09-14 11:50:03.000000000 -0600
> > +++ doc-touches/MAINTAINERS	2006-09-14 12:19:13.000000000 -0600
> > @@ -80,6 +80,12 @@
> > 			it has been replaced by a better system and you
> > 			should be using that.
> >
> > +V: Validation/Test contact and hardware they can test.
> > +
> > +	Identifies folks who are willing to test driver patches, etc.
> > +	Also can identify lack of hardware for otherwize maintained drivers
> > +	by using 'none'
> > +
> > 3C359 NETWORK DRIVER
> > P:	Mike Phillips
> > M:	mikep@linuxtr.net

regards,
--
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xslaby/            Jiri Slaby
faculty of informatics, masaryk university, brno, cz
e-mail: jirislaby gmail com, gpg pubkey fingerprint:
B674 9967 0407 CE62 ACC8  22A0 32CC 55C3 39D4 7A7E
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