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.
That’s what I meant, using your shell to run command line tools to solve your issue at hand. And having a powerful shell with e.g. context dependend autocomplete (and a lot more) helps to speed up that task.
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.
You can do most things by combining simple cmdline tools. E.g. filter out some specific lines from all files in a directory, get the value after the second :, write those to another file and then sort, deduplicate and count them.
This may sound complicated, but it’s pretty easy and fast if your are familiar with a shell. To be that efficient with your shell you want it to actually be powerful and not just a plain text input. Also writing cmdline tools is rather easy compared to a usable GUI tool.
Some (larger) projects sometimes have a form of mentoring and “good first issue” to get started.
Another good way to get involved is to report any issues you face with open source projects you use (obviously search for similar reports first). This way you can help debug bugs or suggest improvements and get some feedback.
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.