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I do think committing via Github would significantly lower the friction of contributing to the Linux kernel for a chunk of the developer population, and there m

by jorvi 6y ago

I do think committing via Github would significantly lower the friction of contributing to the Linux kernel for a chunk of the developer population, and there might actually be a decent well of untapped potential there. Of course there will also be a lot of pull request noise, so I can't say if that tradeoff is ultimately worth it. Edit: well I guess OSS people are extremely hostile to even the discussion of more people contributing to the Linux kernel. My bad.

adwn 6y ago
> committing via Github [...] there might actually be a decent well of untapped potential there I don't buy it. Contributing to the Linux kernel is inherently non-trivial, and I find it completely implausible that any non-negligible number of developers are able to do that while not knowing how to send a mail. Seriously, what's the scenario supposed to be here? "I've found a bug in low-level C code, and it's not a false positive, and I fixed and tested it, and I've looked up and followed the kernel coding guidelines, but I don't know how/am too lazy to send a patch per mail"?
- u801e 6y ago
  > don't know how/am too lazy to send a patch per mail"? Arguably, it's even easier to do so with git format-patch and send-email commands, since they address the issue of MUAs mangling the patch before sending it to the mailing list.
uncomputation 6y ago
It’s not hostility per se, it’s gate keeping/admission. Linux is arguably the greatest OSS ever made and jumping the gun to whatever’s the next trend (GitHub has only been around for ten years) is just unwise. Shiny object syndrome. What happens when GitHub is down and the thousands of projects that depend on Linux (device drivers, networking stacks, soc’s for instance) can no longer access it? Why don’t we just move LWN to Notion? And we can use React 17.8b for the man pages! /s Also GitHub is owned by Microsoft and I hope I don’t need to explain why Linux-users wouldn’t be comfortable with that…

by jorvi 6y ago

adwn 6y ago

> committing via Github [...] there might actually be a decent well of untapped potential there I don't buy it. Contributing to the Linux kernel is inherently non-trivial, and I find it completely implausible that any non-negligible number of developers are able to do that while not knowing how to send a mail. Seriously, what's the scenario supposed to be here? "I've found a bug in low-level C code, and it's not a false positive, and I fixed and tested it, and I've looked up and followed the kernel coding guidelines, but I don't know how/am too lazy to send a patch per mail"?

u801e 6y ago
> don't know how/am too lazy to send a patch per mail"? Arguably, it's even easier to do so with git format-patch and send-email commands, since they address the issue of MUAs mangling the patch before sending it to the mailing list.

uncomputation 6y ago

It’s not hostility per se, it’s gate keeping/admission. Linux is arguably the greatest OSS ever made and jumping the gun to whatever’s the next trend (GitHub has only been around for ten years) is just unwise. Shiny object syndrome. What happens when GitHub is down and the thousands of projects that depend on Linux (device drivers, networking stacks, soc’s for instance) can no longer access it? Why don’t we just move LWN to Notion? And we can use React 17.8b for the man pages! /s Also GitHub is owned by Microsoft and I hope I don’t need to explain why Linux-users wouldn’t be comfortable with that…