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Comment by arghwhat | Hacker News Reader

Having contributed a few times, I'd rate it as similar (sometimes much easier!) than contributing to Firefox and Chromium. That is to say that it is indeed extremely time-consuming and frustrating, but when compared to projects of the same scale it does not necessarily come out as more time-consuming or more frustrating - this will never be a small team collaborating on a random Github repo. A simple "swap out X workflow for Y" does not fix these annoyances, and false dichotomies and peer pressure towards is not a way to cooperate.

I cannot claim to have felt the effects on the maintainer-side of this workflow in large-scale projects though.

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It's way more painful to contribute to the kernel than contribute to Firefox, at least, unless things have changed since I was involved with Firefox.

Suppose you find a bug in the kernel and come up with a patch. You email the patch to some kernel mailing list and ask for feedback. Typically, you will receive no response whatsoever, because no-one is responsible for responding. You can try emailing random developers and eventually maybe one of them will have mercy on you.

In Firefox and I think Chromium, you can file a bug, attach your patch, request review from someone (the UI will help you choose a suitable person), and it's their job to respond.

In my experience it's the opposite - the email patch usually gets dealt with within a week or two, Firefox and Chromium dragged out because it wasn't whatever Mozilla or Google prioritized right now. Or worse, it might go against an internal corporate KPI.

In Firefox you have to fiddle with Mercurial, phabricator, and their homegrown CI. In Chromium its Gerrit and their homegrown CI, and oh btw you touched code that lacked tests so tag, you're it.

"The email patch usually gets dealt with within a week or two" is absolutely not my experience dealing with the kernel.

Firefox and Chromium's bespoke tools have their pluses and minuses but they're a lot easier to deal with that the kernel "workflow".

That your experience is not shared suggests that the other "workflows" are not in fact objectively easier to deal with than the kernel workflow, but instead that there's a high variability in the frustration experienced across all three workflows.

I haven't touched Gecko in a decade, but your second paragraph sounds like my experience. My best record was something like a single character bug fix taking months (might have been years?). Yes, the review flag was set to the right person.

I still remember the story where some other guys had to meet some Mozilla folks for lunch and nag them for reviews…

I'm sorry you had a bad experience with someone, but at least you know who wasn't doing their job. On the kernel side, you don't.

get_maintainer.pl gives you the list. Theres no equivalent in Firefox or Chromium to flag which Mozilla/Red Hat/Google/... manager does not consider your ticket an area of focus.

A kernel maintainer can completely ignore any submission with no repercussions even in principle. And they often do.

In Firefox, in my era at least, a reviewer who simply ignores a review request indefinitely was not doing their job and would get yelled at by someone --- me, if it came to my attention.

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