How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution - eviltoast
Context Around a year and a half ago, I’ve asked my former company for some time to work on an issue that was impacting the debugging capabilities in our project: gdbserver couldn’t debug multithreaded applications running on a PowerPC32 architecture. The connection to the gdbserver was broken and it couldn’t control the debug session anymore. Multiple people have already investigated this problem and I had a good starting point, but we still weren’t sure in which software component the issue lied: it could have been the toolchain, the gdbserver, the Linux kernel or the custom patches we applied on top of the kernel tree. We were quite far away from finding the root cause.
  • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de
    89·
    1 year ago

    I doubt the maintainer would even consider that the contributor would feel “belittled and angry”

    … illustrating my point.

    This whole article could have just been a report of “How I found a bug in the Kernel and helped fix it” - instead of something this negative

    I disagree. If noone spoke out about Linus Torvalds calling people “dumb fucks”, he would still be doing it. So criticism about how the community functions and which behavior is tolerated or even rewarded is essential if we ever want things to change. Did the author do the best job with this article? Probably not. That does not invalidate his experience though.

    • RonSijm@programming.dev
      92·
      1 year ago

      This whole article could have just been a report of “How I found a bug in the Kernel and helped fix it” - instead of something this negative

      I disagree. If noone spoke out about Linus Torvalds calling people “dumb fucks”, he would still be doing it.

      It’s kind of a leap from “not accepting a PR because the maintainer thought the code wasn’t good enough to accept it at face value - and the maintainer apparently didn’t care enough to give the contributor an extended code-review on how to fix it” vs “calling people “dumb fucks””

      If a maintainer get a PR that’s bad and it would take an hour to write an explanation on how to fix it - and then hoping the end-result from the contributor is as expected, otherwise he’ll have to write another explanation on how to fix it and go back and forth for a while - vs - just spending that hour rewriting the fix himself - I’m pretty sure most maintainers just do it themselves.

      When you actually work for a company and you’re working with other (junior) devs, you should go for the option of educating them on what’s wrong with their PR… But in this case - I don’t even know if the maintainer is doing this as a paid job or just in their spare time - but either way why would the maintainer spend time getting the PR right if it was apparently far off.

      Did the author do the best job with this article? Probably not. That does not invalidate his experience though.

      I didn’t say his experience was invalid, but his experience probably isn’t unusual. He could’ve taken this experience as “I contributed the QA and diagnosing part of this bugfix, but my code wasn’t up to par. Next time before submitting some random fix for a bug that I found (that wasn’t even “Up for grabs”) (or discussed how it should be fixed at all) - I should contact the maintainer first” - Instead it seems he found a bug, didn’t really report or communicate about it, because he wanted to race for a fix himself because he wanted to get recognition for actually creating the code the fixed the bug