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.
  • RonSijm@programming.dev
    1·
    1 year ago

    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