Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches (AKA, don't be a KPI jerk)

From: Qu Wenruo
Date: Fri Jun 18 2021 - 02:31:29 EST


Hi Leizhen, and guys in the mail list,

Recently I find one patch removing a debug OOM error message from btrfs selftest.

It's nothing special, some small cleanup work from some kernel newbie.

But the mail address makes me cautious, "@huawei.com".

The last time we got some similar patches from the same company, doing something harmless "cleanup". But those "fixes" are also useless.

This makes me wonder, what is really going on here.

After some quick search, more and more oom error message "cleanup" patches just show up, even some misspell fixes.


It's OK for first-time/student developers to submit such patches, and I really hope such patches would make them become a long term contributor.
In fact, I started my kernel contribution exactly by doing such "cleanups".

But what you guys are doing is really KPI grabbing, I have already see several maintainers arguing with you on such "cleanups", and you're always defending yourself to try to get those patches merged.

You're sending the patch representing your company, by doing this you're really just damaging the already broken reputation.

Please stop this KPI grabbing behavior, and do real contribution to fix the damaged reputation.

Thanks,
Qu