Zbr's days.

Contributors we are losing and kernel summit talk about it.

By 'we' I mean kernel community, although I do not think I personally win or lose if someone decided not to hack on Linux kernel.

I even found myself in a 'contributors we are losing' list :)

And yes, very likely Linux kernel community lost me (and I do believe none cares as long as me). But not Linux kernel, it is definitely the place I like.

People, who want to hack on Linux kernel will do that without all that empty talks and brilliant ideas, all of which are only aimed in a single direction: do what we will ask you to do for us. Be fair and admit that you do not want new ideas implemented, you want old bugs (introduced by someone else) fixed only, so that kernel got more respect without possible additional work for you.

It is not how interested people work, instead they just decide themself how and what to do. That's why kernel janitor project did not succeed: it is not interesting for anyone. The same applies to its refocus to bugfixes.
And I do know what is kernel janitorial: I started with that not long time ago: fixed trivial error checks like request_region()/check_region() code and other minor things like PCI remap errors.
That was hell of crap. Frequently there was a situation, when I fixed lots (like 20 or more) drivers in one go and submitted a patch, instead I was asked to split it to separate patches, to add each driver maintainer into the copy, wait for theirs ACK, resubmit and so on. And frequently happend (especially when new feature was introduced and lot of small code has to be changed a little), that while I did that, some other known kernel hacker did the same, and his patch was immediately applied.

Janitorial and all hypocrisy about 'we want more developers' just suck.

My advice for those who really want to hack on kernel: just do what you like, try yourself in whatever subsystem you want, implement your ideas, be creative and do whatever you like with kernel and not what all those kernel heads tell you to do.
The only way to succeed is to move forward!

Argh, and do not listen for any such kind of advices at all :)

Vegard wrote at 2008-06-06 11:34:

Thanks, this is too true.
I was really struggling to do something correctly until I had the crazy idea of writing kmemcheck.
Only at that point did I have some response from the community, and that's when it started being truly fun.
By trying to implement this completely new feature, I've learned so much more than if I'd just gone around doing cleanups or trivial patches. Also, now I can have interesting discussions with other developers. Discussing some janitorial task is not interesting and nobody will care. That's not fun at all.
Good luck with POHMELFS :-)

Gorcunov wrote at 2008-06-07 21:05:

Heh I found my name too. You are not alone - be strong! Just kidding ;)

Zbr wrote at 2008-06-10 23:53:

That's fun and interesting, so things are just great :)

Fri, 06 Jun 2008