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How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution
(ariel-miculas.github.io)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Somebody is pretty salty for no good reason. The maintainers own patch is nicer code than the suggested patch - and the change is small enough that there just isn't anything available to guide the reporter to a better solution without wasting everyone's time.
I'd probably have added a thanks for debugging effort into the commit message myself - but "please accept my patch because I want to have code in the kernel" is a very stupid thing to say, and the maintainer offering a suitable problem to fix is more than I'd have done in that situation.
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.
We should keep in mind that this is a one-sided account on how a mundane bugfix issue was handled. Grain of salt required.
Nevertheless, the blog author said he received feedback from members of the Linux kernel security mailing list. Even though I think he could have received more credit than reporting the issue, that was basically his contribution: he pinpointed where the bug was. He also contributed a couple of patches that were faulty and unusable, and the maintainer had to step in and roll out his own fix.
I understand that fixing a nontrivial bug is a badge of honor, and getting credit for critical contributions might have more implications than a warm feeling. However, if the submitted patches were unusable then what would be the desirable outcome? I mean, should Linux users be deprived of a bug fix because a first-timr contributor is struggling with putting together a working patch?
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.
There is no trust needed when asking someone to fix a bug. It's not like the maintainer would lose anything if the contributor failed to fix the bug.
Besides, I think it is natural to want recognition when you do a lot of work for free. Many other people wouldn't do this unpaid work at all; recognizing their contribution is the bare minimum of good manners. Even in a company where employees are paid for their work, it is customary to give credit to co-workers who have helped you. Most people don't like to work in places where they don't feel appreciated, and that is also true in Open-Source.