[OnePlus 3 ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries, & Other Devel] bedalus:
Help with testing is always very much appreciated.

It's common knowledge that the linux kernel is under constant development with patches coming in from all over the world from staff working at corporations, not-for-profits, hobbyists and the like. Patches get passed up the chain, meet with the approval of increasingly senior developers, and ultimately get merged into the mainline.

Because the 3.18 release is LTS we have some of these senior developers ensuring that critical security and stability patches are merged in to the maintenance branch, so it's always a good idea to pull in these commits. I remember back on the nexus S though, one of these commits caused a problem and had to be removed, proving that there is always the possibility that something unanticipated will happen after a patch.

All the kernel developers here in the forum are trying to achieve something fairly similar, to ensure that they pull in as many patches as possible that will improve performance, stability, and add even new features (like Sultan's disabling of the capacitive keys when the screen is in use). Because we're all sort of doing the same thing, there's a sort of tacit agreement that we'll take whatever we like from each other so long as we give credit (like how I've taken Sultan's work and adapted it for stock OOS, take a look at my commit logs here and here).

I think a lot of users put pressure on developers to add every possible feature because they are really curious and want to try everything out, which is fine, but often don't want to do the groundwork and test the changes fully. I've been doing this for years, and before I really got into development, I was very keen on thorough testing. I tested every IO scheduler and CPU governor and all sorts of other things, and found that generally speaking, the default choices work the best. Facts can easily get buried in an avalanche of hype. Say I added SIO, someone runs Antutu once and gets a better score, posts a screenshot, and everyone replies "Wow amazing!" and downloads the kernel and posts similar results... I'd get a lot of extra users! Great! More help testing. But really that result was a fluke, and running the test over and over produces results that vary from bad to good, and IO requests for background processes are starved leading to bad overall experience. No-one is interested in these facts because they're too subtle, or they don't want to believe there new device has limits. The majority of users don't want to run benchmarks a hundred times. Because of the hype and the quick-win mentality that goes on, in order to do good work, I have to be really careful about what I take from other developers' repos.

I perhaps sound like I'm being scathing of other developers with long feature lists and every single patch from CAF. In all honesty I'm probably jealous of the attention they get. But when I quit XDA originally I had over 9000 thanks and I was addicted to getting more and more. It's feels good to post a trivial update and get 20 'Thanks', but it's also a hollow feeling. I knew I was getting most of those thanks because I already had so many that people automatically assumed I was doing the best work. I wasn't doing the best work. There were other new guys appearing in the forum all the time, doing interesting work but getting no attention.

My philosophy now is that I'm doing the work to satisfy myself alone, and I'm just sharing the results. Help testing is always appreciated, and I'm happy to hear suggestions, so long as people are prepared to hear a 'no'.