101–110 of 116 posts
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Unrelated to the article, but the early British seasons of Kitchen Nightmares were so good. I still enjoy watching the Fox version (and his new show, 24 Hours), but I appreciate those original seasons much more.
You might like The British Baking Show on Netflix. No yelling, everyone is super supportive of each other.
I've submitted many such small corrections to OpenBSD to help keep that standard high. No one will place those contributions on the same level as real development but I like that I've helped. And I know I appreciate it when even the documentation is kept at the same bar. One of the reasons I fell in love with OpenBSD was the commitment to correctness throughout the entire system. This is a lot harder with Linux becau…
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In my experience, you can read a (large) code base all you want, but until you get in there and start making (breaking) changes, you're not truly going to understand it. I think Linus's quote largely reflects my opinion/experience. A new comer's changes won't always be good or right, but get in there and try things out!
I have been trying to get into that with not much success. It looks like I end up trying to understand the whole thing at once. I don't know how to look at the source code which solves a specific small problem. Is there proper guide by earlier contributors about how to get used to the source and start breaking/fixing things?
It gives you exposure to code, the dev loop, general idea of how things work. Then one can take on bigger and bigger challenges.
We all gotta start somewhere.
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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 +1…
From this POV btw Github does a terrible job not telling maintainers: "merging this PR will result in the following PRs being no longer mergeable". Most of the times the list would be empty, making the merging of small PRs a lot more a non brainer.
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…
E.g. look at 22-52 days old denied PRs on the HTML spec: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed
That's an entirely different thing to "serious" small fixes that actually clean up small problems in docs and such.
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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
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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…
The US Kitchen Nightmares are completely faked up drama for US audiences. Watch some of the original UK ones and you’ll see how he tries to coach the chefs with comparatively minimal swearing and anger.
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This is such a great comment and very true. Looking at the speed and attitude that maintainers handle trivial PRs with can act as an indicator of the project health and will definitely make it more inviting for new contributors!
I am a bit sad that Linus is more known for his occasional frank outbursts than for his consistent encouragement and supportive tone.
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Someone can be an asshole and a great leader, at the same or different times. Linus himself, to his credit, recently admitted that he's been unreasonably abusive and is trying to learn better.[0] People are complicated. He needn't be either a saint or a demon. [0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167
The thing is, all Linus rants that I've seen are entirely reasonable. Yes, calling someone stupid is rude, but rude things should be used in extreme circumstances. And when a single developer can negatively affect millions - wait, actually, billions - of people around the world with a stupid patch, that's exactly the case where being rude and aggressive is entirely reasonable.