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.
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 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.