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How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution (ariel-miculas.github.io)

submitted 1 year ago by kairos to c/programming

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I didn't meant to defend the patch and I see your point. But I personally think that it's not unreasonable to expect to land a bugfix commit after spending multiple days debugging a complex issue, that's why understand that he feels robbed of a kernel contribution.

I don't know what could have been a good solution for this scenario. But taking potential future contributors feelings more serious would help to keep them around and make them feel appreciated.

[–] lysdexic 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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”

The shit storm he brew up in response to getting feedback on his very first pull request is way more concerning than churning out low-quality code.

Coding skills can be improved, specially from the first pull request onward. Toxic behavior such as putting up very public smear campaigns in response to getting feedback on his very first patch submission is a major red flag, and is as toxic as it gets.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

That's roughly what I meant - he should've come out of that experience having learned a lot (there's even an explanation why the other code is better on the mailing list), and had the option of working on a different problem (while he didn't say which I assume it was selected to be more beginner friendly). And instead he's throwing a temper tantrum - that's too risky behaviour for hiring.