Time-wasting commits called out as effort to burnish submission metrics
Last week, Linux kernel contributor Qu Wenruo scolded another code donor, Zhen Lei, for wasting kernel maintainers’ time with unnecessary patches. In a post to Zhen Lei and the rest of the Linux kernel mailing list, Wenruo said he recently found a patch removing a debug out-of-memory error message from a selftest used by btrfs, a file system supported by the Linux kernel. “It’s nothing special, some small cleanup work from some kernel newbie,” wrote Wenruo. “But the mail address makes me cautious, ‘@huawei.com’.” This is not the first time similar harmless “cleanup” patches have come from Huawei, said Wenruo, who observed those fixes were also “useless.” “This makes me wonder, what is really going on here,” he wrote, noting that a quick search found a number of patches to “cleanup” out-of-memory error messages or to fix misspellings. Wenruo’s theory is that Zhen Lei submitted this inconsequential patch for Key Performance Indicator (KPI) credit – to do something that gets recognized by an employee performance measurement system as meaningful work. Wenruo said it’s fine for new developers and students to submit these sorts of patches, noting that he started his kernel contributions in the same way and that he hopes these small patches will lead to long term contributions. “But what you guys are doing is really KPI grabbing,” he said. “I have already seen several maintainers arguing with you on such ‘cleanups,’ and you’re always defending yourself to try to get those patches merged.
