Regardless of deserved credit your reputation in the kernel community will be that of a drama llama at least for awhile. Making a mountain out of a mole hill, will be remembered, does not play well with others.
I’m not saying you don’t deserve credit, but the method you went about emoting over this event will be noticed by community managers, not just the kernel community. Be aware of how your reputation is developed. Lots of us had to eat some humble pie in our career development.
If you had spun this in your personal blog on how you helped fix a kernel bug, and spoke of the positives, then you would be seen as more of a team player, plays well with others, doesn’t get bogged down on small issues.
Our character isn’t defined when times are good, but with how we deal with adversity.
aard@kyu.de 1 year ago
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.
SWW13@lemmy.brief.guru 1 year ago
As someone how 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.
aard@kyu.de 1 year ago
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”
lysdexic@programming.dev 1 year ago
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?
kairos@programming.dev 1 year ago
Unfortunately I don’t have my original patch, because I only sent that to the Linux security mailing list. I don’t think it’s a stupid thing to want to have code in the kernel, especially after spending all my time debugging this issue. The fix was trivial once I’ve pointed to the exact place where the buffer overflow happened and I should have received credit for all my effort.
aard@kyu.de 1 year ago
You did receive credit. A good bug report allows reproducing and ideally fixing the issue - which can involve considerable effort. This is the difference between your report, and the one you linked from 6 years ago.
Like I said, I’d probably have added an additional thanks for that in my commit message - but I’m unfamiliar with the kind of reports this particular subsystem typically receives, so it is quite possible your report is just something average coming in there.
I personally prefer to include code suggesting a fix in my bug reports - but I usually don’t expect it to be just merged as I’m not familiar with surrounding code. I also don’t expect that to receive an additional mention - it’s just part of the report, and is often cleaner in demonstrating the issue than a problem description.
lysdexic@programming.dev 1 year ago
The way that you jumped straight onto broadcasting drama when your very first Linux kernel patch stumbled on the code review stage is a major red flag.
I would hate to work with you because I would feel that I would be risking being subjected to a very public character attack each time I had to review one of your patches.
bloopernova@programming.dev 1 year ago
I think you’ll be happier in the long run if you can forgive and move on.