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.
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.
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