Hacker News Reader

Comment by underdeserver | Hacker News Reader

Hard to judge this situation without hearing the other side. I don't know if the PowerPC maintainer saw significant issues with this guy's code.

One thing I do know is that putting in a lot of work up front, without any communication, sending a patch and then getting all worked up if it's not accepted is not generally a good strategy.

View on HN

I think that OP had not so much a problem with the PowerPC maintainer coming up with his own solution (which is basically the same, except maybe fitting the coding style better), but the fact that all his efforts for finding the root cause of the bug were not recognized.

The PowerPC maintainer could have send him a message like: "Thank you for the patch. Thank you for diving into this bug and finding the root cause. I will attribute your effort. I have taken the liberty to come up with a solution that better matches the coding standards. I hope you do not mind. I will submit the following patch." and I think the OP would be perfectly happy.

> but the fact that all his efforts for finding the root cause of the bug were not recognized.

But they were! That's exactly what 'Reported-by' is for.

Not exactly. Reported-by is for reporting the symptom; the root cause analysis is separate (and often requires much more work).

Some do, some don't. The chances of getting something fixed increase with the amount of prepwork that you do. I try to include as much detail as I can when reporting a bug, typically those reports get ignored so OP materially improved his chances by doing that, but root cause analysis is still covered by 'Reported-by' as far as I can see.

> One thing I do know is that putting in a lot of work up front, without any communication, sending a patch and then getting all worked up if it's not accepted is not generally a good strategy.

It is generally a very bad strategy to do unasked work and expect appreciation or gratitude in return.

Which is why the OSS model never took off. Or wait...

Most of the work was probably debugging the issue and pinning down the cause. I guess we have all had issues which took a lot of time to debug, but the actual fix was just a few lines (or even just a few characters). And you have to do that work "up front" - I mean, asking the Linux maintainers in advance if they're ok with you trying to pin down an issue you're facing would sound a bit strange?

That and being a kernel developer is for the most part not all that glamorous. For me whenever I ended up sending a kernel patch it was because I uncovered some bug while working on a larger userspace project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com