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“The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

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Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#81
post #77
post #9

Linus on trivial patches: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 [ Linux-kernel added back into the cc, because I actually think this is important. ] On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Jesper Juhl wrote: > Should I just stop attemting to make these trivial cleanups/fixes/whatever patches? are they more noice than gain? am I being a pain to more skilled people on lkml or can you all live with my, sometimes quite ignorant, patches? I…

Linus says: > I think the trivial patches are among the most important ones - exactly because they are the "entry" patches for every new developer. I have been running a fairly successful open source project and this is not exactly my experience. I guess about 70% of pull request I get is simple spell, grammar, white spaces and the likes. Some time folks send this in wholesale because they want their personal favorit…

> takes enormous amount of time to go through each line and each file

>My thesis is that there are lots of folks out there just trying to brag to be "contributor" for popular open source projects

Do you have an example of this? All I could find in your top 3 repos was one pull request updating the readme and its only 8 lines.

https://github.com/sytelus/CryptoJS/pull/3/files

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#82

Love this, but was a bit confused because the patch is 4 years old, a fact which which confirmed my initial misreading of the patch being 4 years old (rather than the correct reading that it was by a 4-year-old)

Interesting. I wonder if Maisa has gone on to write any more patches yet!

Or if she got corrupted by the dark side and works for FB now!

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#83
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She learned that her opinion is valued. She learned that it's ok to question things. She likely had a sense, based on the activity that followed, that she effected change in some way. I'm sure it was explained to her, and while of course she doesn't understand what a kernel or source code are, she surely had a sense of some positive accomplishment.

The world will become a better place if all kids get this golden treatment. I wish we could so easily push trivial changes to society but, in a very small way, this ripple in the ocean did.

"See this? We just need to change one little thing. There is a problem with the program and we can fix it: the president variable is orange. Let's work on that"

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#84

Well, now a 4-year-old has one more kernel patch than I have...

Here's one you can submit, from the same file near the top in the ToC. It's missing two spaces after the header number. This line is sad because the lines above it and below it are able to stay lined up, but this line looks out of place. Being different may be a good thing for people, but it is not a good thing when you are talking about alignment in the Table of Contents.

  ---1.9 Ext4 file system parameters

  +++1.9   Ext4 file system parameters

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#85
post #35
post #9

Linus on trivial patches: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 [ Linux-kernel added back into the cc, because I actually think this is important. ] On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Jesper Juhl wrote: > Should I just stop attemting to make these trivial cleanups/fixes/whatever patches? are they more noice than gain? am I being a pain to more skilled people on lkml or can you all live with my, sometimes quite ignorant, patches? I…

I agree on the general concept of your post, however I cannot observe, at least for the things I maintain, that there is this pattern of "people starting small". At least not small in the sense of trivial changes. They maybe start submitting a small PR but that is most of the times already at the level of the contribution that they'll make in the future. So people that will become core contributors will send a small…

Here's my first PR to Rust: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4305

Note that it was rejected because I sent it into the wrong branch (we do use master these days) and so I even had to resubmit it https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4308

I'm about to send in my 972nd PR now. The Rust book is 520 pages; that was the second version, the first of which was ~300 pages. Quite a big difference from +34/-2. I'm at +142,087/-166,524 lines to the main repo now, and #12 overall contributor.

Yes, not everyone who sends in a small patch will become a core contributor. But some will. It's a numbers game.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#86

Well, now a 4-year-old has one more kernel patch than I have...

There's nothing stopping you, except finding the time. One of the things I'm most proud of as a dev is a tiny contribution to the Nim standard library. It's a single commit and very simple, but made the PostgreSQL adapter consistent with the other RBDMSs' adapters. At the time, I'd been using Nim for only a couple of days, but that didn't stop me from being able to contribute in a meaningful way. I'm amused and humbl…

> I'm amused and humbled that despite all of the work I've done over the past decade, it's quite likely that a seven-line change that I did mostly in ignorance will be the thing that impacts the most people going forward.

My most popular open source project, by the numbers, is a ~40 line Rack middleware I wrote when jetlagged at 2am. ~29MM downloads all-time, 984 github stars.

I think about that all the time.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#88
post #9

Linus on trivial patches: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 [ Linux-kernel added back into the cc, because I actually think this is important. ] On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Jesper Juhl wrote: > Should I just stop attemting to make these trivial cleanups/fixes/whatever patches? are they more noice than gain? am I being a pain to more skilled people on lkml or can you all live with my, sometimes quite ignorant, patches? I…

I really hope that next time when somebody tries to paint Linus as an asshole and a toxic force for the community because of his rants, someone remembers to link this email too.

Just because someone is frequently an asshole doesn't mean they're an asshole 100% of the time.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope that next time when somebody tries to paint Linus as an asshole and a toxic force for the community because of his rants, someone remembers to link this email too.

It demonstrates how Linus is not only a good programmer, but also a good leader. I get the same idea as with the first Gordon Ramsey Kitchen-fixing programmes. Apparently, people said it was insane how he dared to swear on TV. But basically, he notices things are very wrong, makes sure he gets to the bottom of the mess, and hammers the ugly message very publicly into some owner who lost any connection with reality. I…

Mitchell & Webb's take on Kitchen Nightmares, more criticism than comedy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1NfWIaYed8

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#90
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope that next time when somebody tries to paint Linus as an asshole and a toxic force for the community because of his rants, someone remembers to link this email too.

Just because someone is frequently an asshole doesn't mean they're an asshole 100% of the time.

Well, serial killers don't kill almost all the time also. Reminds me of that Monty Python sketch where the army guy tries to reassure the interviewer by saying there's "almost no cannibalism in the British Army."
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