I submitted a pull request to Vim and the maintainer thanked me, tweaked it, and my name is not in the commit history because of it. I use to be bitter about it, if only a little. So I know how you feel but I put significantly less time into mine so the magnitude of the feeling is much smaller for me. My name is still there in the GitHub pull request though. Just like your name is still in the commit itself and in the mailing list. Try not to fret too much about the specifics of your name being in the author field. It’s really just a technical detail.
It sucks but it is what it is. I don’t think treating this like you were slighted is appropriate.
Somebody is pretty salty for no good reason. The maintainers own patch is nicer code than the suggested patch - and the change is small enough that there just isn’t anything available to guide the reporter to a better solution without wasting everyone’s time.
I’d probably have added a thanks for debugging effort into the commit message myself - but “please accept my patch because I want to have code in the kernel” is a very stupid thing to say, and the maintainer offering a suitable problem to fix is more than I’d have done in that situation.
As someone who had a mildly unpleasant interaction with kernel folks, I can totally understand the issue.
This is one of the very few open source projects I had the feeling they don’t appreciate new contributers. There is no on boarding material available and picking the wrong subproject mailing list results in being ignored. You have to spend days without any possibility of help and if your are lucky you get mentioned as a reporter. For the next issue you start from square one as there was no guidance, so you could only learn the bare minimum.
So yeah, his patch may be underwhelming. But the help and credit he got for days or weeks of unpaid work was basically nothing. You may be okay with spending days and only getting credits for the bug report, but I suspect many aren’t and will not contribute again after such an experience. And post like this try to point out the issue they have and why many people won’t contribute to the kernel ever again.
So yeah, his patch may be underwhelming. But the help and credit he got for days or weeks of unpaid work was basically nothing. You may be okay with spending days and only getting credits for the bug report, but I suspect many aren’t and will not contribute again after such an experience.
Especially in this particular case the effort is in debugging the problem, not doing the actual fix - which is the bug report, where he got credited for. lkml is not the place for “how I debugged this problem” - that’d be what goes into his blog. And if you look around you’ll see a lot of “how I helped solving this problem” kind of blog posts.
This change is so simple that guiding him to do it in a good way would involve fixing it yourself in the explanation - and then you’d not show the code so he can do it himself? That’s just silly. If he cares about that he came out of that with quite a bit of experience on how to handle it the next time - and he mentions he even got an (assumed to be starter friendly) other issue suggested if he wants to have code in the kernel.
From the perspective of hiring people he turned this from a “nice work debugging a problem, might be a useful candidate” to “tries getting low quality code merged for vanity reasons, let’s avoid that guy”
But the help and credit he got for days or weeks of unpaid work was basically nothing.
We should keep in mind that this is a one-sided account on how a mundane bugfix issue was handled. Grain of salt required.
Nevertheless, the blog author said he received feedback from members of the Linux kernel security mailing list. Even though I think he could have received more credit than reporting the issue, that was basically his contribution: he pinpointed where the bug was. He also contributed a couple of patches that were faulty and unusable, and the maintainer had to step in and roll out his own fix.
I understand that fixing a nontrivial bug is a badge of honor, and getting credit for critical contributions might have more implications than a warm feeling. However, if the submitted patches were unusable then what would be the desirable outcome? I mean, should Linux users be deprived of a bug fix because a first-timr contributor is struggling with putting together a working patch?
Good point, this could just misrepresentat the situation. I also haven’t looked over the mailing list thread and comments here are very salty.
But giving him the benefit of doubt of a nice potential contributer who just debugged a very hard issue and sending in a basic concept of a potential fix. I think it would be beneficial for their community to take the wish for more credit more serious and try to make him feel welcome. But I recognize it was probably hard to do in this case.
Overall I just wanted to recognize that I do see how he feels robbed of his contribution. It reminded me that I also had an experience with the kernel developers that made me not want to contribute again.
I think it would be beneficial for their community to take the wish for more credit more serious and try to make him feel welcome.
I think they did. Apparently the maintainer trusted the first-time contributor enough to propose tackling another bug.
If the goal is to get more contributions, I think that’s exactly what should happen. I feel the kernel maintainer is being treated unfairly.
Whining about getting extra work feels like the author didn’t intended to contribute anything else and just put all this reputation chips on that one isolated ticket.
Unfortunately I don’t have my original patch, because I only sent that to the Linux security mailing list. I don’t think it’s a stupid thing to want to have code in the kernel, especially after spending all my time debugging this issue. The fix was trivial once I’ve pointed to the exact place where the buffer overflow happened and I should have received credit for all my effort.
I don’t think it’s a stupid thing to want to have code in the kernel, especially after spending all my time debugging this issue.
The way that you jumped straight onto broadcasting drama when your very first Linux kernel patch stumbled on the code review stage is a major red flag.
I would hate to work with you because I would feel that I would be risking being subjected to a very public character attack each time I had to review one of your patches.
The way that you jumped straight onto broadcasting drama
I’m not broadcasting drama, I’m sharing my side of the story on my personal blog and distribute it to other social media platforms.
your very first Linux kernel patch stumbled on the code review stage
The patch didn’t stumble on the code review stage, the PowerPC maintainer didn’t want to accept patches from me and implemented his own fix.
I would hate to work with you because I would feel that I would be risking being subjected to a very public character attack each time I had to review one of your patches.
Why would you hate people who would describe their interactions with you? The only reason I see is that you would hate how you’ve dealt with them.
Regardless of deserved credit your reputation in the kernel community will be that of a drama llama at least for awhile. Making a mountain out of a mole hill, will be remembered, does not play well with others.
I’m not saying you don’t deserve credit, but the method you went about emoting over this event will be noticed by community managers, not just the kernel community. Be aware of how your reputation is developed. Lots of us had to eat some humble pie in our career development.
If you had spun this in your personal blog on how you helped fix a kernel bug, and spoke of the positives, then you would be seen as more of a team player, plays well with others, doesn’t get bogged down on small issues.
Our character isn’t defined when times are good, but with how we deal with adversity.
There’s a difference between being a team player and a subservient pawn though - if the maintainer wanted to play as a team they would’ve suggested changes to the patch and accepted OP’s PR. As it happens they didn’t as they clearly have some sort of a power/superiority complex or something, or at best are dismissive of others to the detriment of the project they work on
I think it is common knowledge by now that the kernel community is a rather toxic space where abuse and elitism are the norm rather than the exception. If you are unwilling to put up with that, it’s probably the wrong community for you to join.
I am not really seeing any toxic behaviour here.
OP’s patch was largely based on code in
ptrace32.c, but that code actually looks quite bad. So maintainer applied a better fix. Maybeptrace32.cshould be updated to use code that’s more similar toptrace-fpu.cnow?So maintainer applied a better fix.
That in itself is the problem. If the kernel community wants to attract new contributors, mentorship is important and appreciation of effort is important, despite the result of that effort not being up to par yet.
The general consensus in kernel space is to “only care about the code” (to quote Linus Torvalds himself) and not about about people, while in reality when two human beings interact with one another, it’s never “just about the code”.
The kernel is already suffering from this behavior. The majority of people contributing do so for money. Hobbyists who contribute out of passion in their free time have already become a side show, being pushed out more and more by the ever-present elitism of people who can spend 50h a week becoming experts. On the other hand, the number of people willing to tolerate a hostile work environment just for money is decreasing rapidly.
The kernel code is already deteriorating, code is being merged without anyone ever reviewing it as nobody has the time, energy or patience. Unless the kernel community starts changing from the inside out, we will see real problems popping up more and more in the next ten years.
That in itself is the problem. If the kernel community wants to attract new contributors, mentorship is important and appreciation of effort is important, despite the result of that effort not being up to par yet.
Well it depends on the quality of the PR. If there are minor things wrong, you can point them out the the contributor and help them get their PR to a level you want…
If the PR is “Ok, thanks for pointing out where the issue is, but I’m going to have to rewrite your solution entirely” - what is the maintainer supposed to do? Take their PR, overwrite the solution, and git squash them together so the original contributor gets “credit” in form of being in the git history?
I doubt the maintainer would even consider that the contributor would feel “belittled and angry” if their fix wasn’t accepted at face value, or if they didn’t get enough credit would write an angry blog post about it. 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
