3 ms·

Linus on small, trivial patches (2004)

46 points by pcr910303 5y ago

BaconPackets 5y ago
Software longevity is something that I have bene thinking about for a little bit. At $dayjob, we use Openstack, an open source cloud infrastructure project. It's a pretty complicated set of projects that interact to each other in order to provide multi-tenancy for virtual machines at scale. It was initially all the rage, before the cloud starting really picking up steam. So now, you have a massive project that is slowly losing traction, but also relying on that notoriety to gain developers. So, I think Linus point is quite valid. These small, low risk, low value patches are essential in having a healthy community around a product. They help easing your way into a codebase, developpement flow and all the other idiosyncrasies of established tech circles.
- mrslave 5y ago
  Is not OpenStack the best way to get cloud without using another Cloud Service(TM)?
  - BaconPackets 5y ago
    The only way I would be comfortable deploying Openstack in a large scale enterprise structure is a pre-packaged solution from Red Hat/Canonical. There is just so much that can go wrong and so much that goes into maintaining the life cycle. Frankly, at this point in time of the industry, your business case better drive the need for on premise computing. If it doesnt --> AWS/gcp/azure
medstrom 5y ago
How trival are we talking? I haven't merged someone else's code, but I'd think that for sufficiently trivial patches, the maintainer just reads it and copy-pastes most of it manually to the relevant place in the code. This seems no bother.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  Code gets copy pasted manually???? I would never have guessed that. Don't they just use Git merging?
  - mrslave 5y ago
    It's 2004 so they're not using Git, but they are using patch (applies the output generated by diff). Actually at the time I believe the Linux kernel team were using a proprietary product that was a significant improvement upon CVS & Subversion. But if you weren't a maintainer you could still get changes in via a maintainer who would review your work. You would send them a patch via email.

46 points by pcr910303 5y ago

Software longevity is something that I have bene thinking about for a little bit. At $dayjob, we use Openstack, an open source cloud infrastructure project. It's a pretty complicated set of projects that interact to each other in order to provide multi-tenancy for virtual machines at scale. It was initially all the rage, before the cloud starting really picking up steam. So now, you have a massive project that is slowly losing traction, but also relying on that notoriety to gain developers. So, I think Linus point is quite valid. These small, low risk, low value patches are essential in having a healthy community around a product. They help easing your way into a codebase, developpement flow and all the other idiosyncrasies of established tech circles.

mrslave 5y ago
Is not OpenStack the best way to get cloud without using another Cloud Service(TM)?
- BaconPackets 5y ago
  The only way I would be comfortable deploying Openstack in a large scale enterprise structure is a pre-packaged solution from Red Hat/Canonical. There is just so much that can go wrong and so much that goes into maintaining the life cycle. Frankly, at this point in time of the industry, your business case better drive the need for on premise computing. If it doesnt --> AWS/gcp/azure

medstrom 5y ago

How trival are we talking? I haven't merged someone else's code, but I'd think that for sufficiently trivial patches, the maintainer just reads it and copy-pastes most of it manually to the relevant place in the code. This seems no bother.

eternityforest 5y ago
Code gets copy pasted manually???? I would never have guessed that. Don't they just use Git merging?
- mrslave 5y ago
  It's 2004 so they're not using Git, but they are using patch (applies the output generated by diff). Actually at the time I believe the Linux kernel team were using a proprietary product that was a significant improvement upon CVS & Subversion. But if you weren't a maintainer you could still get changes in via a maintainer who would review your work. You would send them a patch via email.