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How Can One Attract the Developer's Attention?
"I can't mail Alan Cox (who seems the right person for a fix to 2.2) directly because he rejects all mail from folks he doesn't know. Since the bug causes problems for gdb I mailed the gdb developer list, but also met with silence. So, how can I get someone to take notice? If no-one does, what's the point of an 'open' process? I may as well not bother."
First off, a good deal of patience is necessary when dealing with developers, they can be extremely busy when it comes to dealing with the pressures not only from their day jobs, but also from their code, their other hobbies and whatever time is left over for them to have lives to themselves. Even on internet time, certain things (like bug reports) will slip thru the cracks and seemingly fall into the ether...a few times, this might be the case, most often though, it is not and the developer just hasn't gotten to your bug/comment/suggestion yet.
A suggestion to developers: If you haven't looekd into this, it might not hurt to automate some form of reply stating your situation so that you don't alienate users by your non-response.
Thoughts?
Update: 09/05 11:50 PM by C : Alan Cox had this to say via email:
"I can't mail Alan Cox (who seems the right person for a fix to 2.2) directly because he rejects all mail from folks he doesn't know."This is wrong. I reject mail from sites in ORBS, RBL or other major spam block lists.
A few things I'd suggest:
- There is a REPORTING-BUGS file in 2.2/2.3 kernels
- You should start with MAINTAINERS in the kernel for kernel bug reports
- If its a vendor supplied kernel start with the vendor bug report system such as http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla [for Red Hat]. ( C : There's also Debian's bug reporting system at http://www.debian.org/Bugs, and the one for Mandrake-Linux at http://www.linux-mandrake.com/bugs, for other flavors of Linux, check your vendor's homepage)
As I said, the developers are listening. You just might need to take the time to find the right communication channel. For a bug report to be worth something, it has to end up in the right place.
Both of these systems allow a bug to be assigned, prioritized, and tracked. I know of many closed source companies (most of whom prefer to remain nameless) who use these systems as they are robust, reasonably mature, and don't cost a dime! Highly recommended. :)
--- Brent Rockwood, Senior Software Developer
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
You mean there is no BugZilla for Linux kernels? How do you guys keep track of bugs?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I wanted to amend the driver, but couldn't locate any maintainer. I emailed linux-kernel instead, asking who was in charge of the driver, in case anyone else had already fixed it, or anyone had the specs for this particular version of the card. Alan had worked on the module support for this driver sometime in the past.
The only one to respond was Alan, stating that the code wasn't currently maintained. We exchanged a few emails, when I decided to modify the driver. A few days later (having had to reload Windows95 to discover how the DOS driver worked), I produced a minor kernel patch and submitted it to Alan.
I got a very brief response, and around 2-3 months later the patch appeared in one of the 2.3.x kernel patches.
Just have patience...
... and in Linux kernel development, which is not really much like either of these systems of government, those who prove themselves over time (and yes, it can take a long time) get things faster / better. Which is good because it's in everyones interest.
Are you suggesting that those who get their patches included first are just somehow a bunch of good friends? I suppose it's a coincidence that they happen to each be (arguably) some of the best in the world at what they do then?
If it's closer to either, Linux development is closer to capitalism since you're more likely to get what you want (your patch included and the kernel fixed) if you can give the kernel gods what they want (proven track record of previous useful or insightful patches of design ideas) Compare these to getting what you want (a new car) because you can give them what they want (a good credit rating to show you are going to pay [compare with "show your patch will probably work])
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
OK, score me Flamebait for using the S-word again, but this is to be expected. In a capitalist system, the wealthy get things better, faster, etc. In a socialist system, there is the illusion of equality via the elimination of capital, but the fundamental laws of economics remain unchanged. You have just replaced dollar capital with social capital. What is social capital? It's how well connected you are, whether or not you are a member of the "3 initial club" or something like that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The vger list is dead mabye you posted there?
Forget the traditional route of submitting a bug report and waiting for Linus to accept it... instead, write a quick, half-assed article for ZDnet or Cnet about the major Linux bug/vulnerability you've found, and the resulting controversy will certainly grab the developers attention. I'm sure the now-infamous Mindcraft web benchmarks had something to do with the fact that kernel 2.4 includes a fully revamped, SMP-aware TCP/IP stack.
Seriously, though, Linux does need some sort of central bug repository, and this type of thing was recently address by ESR himself in a linux kernel mailing list post. For Linux to continue as a strong player in the Server OS market, some level of professionalism and organization must be achieved...
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Ok, it's really easy to get the attention of developers. You just need to figure out where they hang out. /. as a covert channel to discuss the kernel. You haven't noticed since they use steganography to hide their messages from m$. It's true - vladinator is actually hans reiser, spiralx is alan cox, trollaxor is ingo molnar and magenta syringe is linus.
The kernel mailing list is a bad choice since it's read by thousands of M$ spies. The kernel developers know this, so that's why they post misleading and erroneous mailings there. It's all about subterfuge.
So if they're not on kernel-dev, where are they?
Simple you moron, they're reading slashdot. They use
They use the entities and goatse links to communicate in a form of morse code. Try viewing source - it's informative.
Anyway, now that you know where to find the kernel developers, you need to get their attention. This is easy since linux hackers are only interested in one thing: Natalie Portman.
(note for the confused, Natalie Portman used to be the code word for the rewrite of the scsi subsystem in 2.4, but it was causing too much of a problem with spontaneous orgasms, so they switched to olsen twins this is why osm *actually davem@redhat.com* used to post about it all the time.)
At any rate, claim that you have nude photos of Natalie Portman and you'll get their attention. Now that you've got their attention, post a link to the Portman pix that points to goatse.cx. This will let them know that you want to participate in kernel development. Now you wait. They'll contact you and integrate your patch.
--Shoeboy
Just end your post to the list with:
Please reply to linus_torvalds@hotmail.com.
Your patch will immediately be entered into the kernel without a second thought.
love,
br4dh4x0r
I would like to submit several patches that I have created.
After that I would like to dump a load of suggestions and feature requests. I would also like to nag them about the direction they are taking with the kernal. I may also engage in a bit of hero worshipping followed by some light stalking.
Once I become bored with that, I expect I will want to be just friends and have each of them on my ICQ to chat with me all day. Eventually, I will sell my access to news media and spam lists. Either that or use mind control so that I can control them when they take over the universe.
Thank you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is it not about time for a more efficient way of organizing developers than the time honoured, but woefully inefficient mailing list? I know OSS people have a reputation for refusing to adopt new ways of working but this is insane.
We need something new and standard that is threaded, searchable and publicly accessable. Plain email just isn't an efficient medium for organizing tasks of this complexity and people's input and work get lost, or at the very least goes unrecognized.
Is there _any_ movement out there away from the primary use of mailing lists as an organizing medium?
Whether or not he was going about it the right way, it looks like he has been plenty patient.
http://www.geocrawler.com/arch ives/3/35/2000/6/0/3875772/
This is from June, and the post indicates he posted the bugfix in December of 1999.
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
I think this is one of the central issues: if the developers don't recognize your name, they don't have any way to assess the validity of what you've posted, other than potentially spending significant time reviewing your bug or patch. You might think you've found an esoteric bug, and even fixed it, but you might be completely wrong (and this does happen, I've seen it.) Or, your fix might be undesirable in some way. Or, it just may not be that important - if no-one else has reported it, and there are hundreds or thousands of other problems known to affect thousands of people, which ones should be fixed first?
After all, the people intimately involved with the kernel can't be expected to, and shouldn't, automatically apply every patch posted to the list. There needs to be some review. The problem in the case mentioned in the article is really that the developer didn't catch the attention of anyone willing to take the time to review his patch. Instead of throwing it out there, he could perhaps have tried to find the person or persons most likely to be familiar with the problem he was addressing, and ask that person directly if he would be willing to review his patch.
Open Source and/or Free Software requires intelligent actions amongst its contributors. Throwing a patch or bug report over the wall doesn't necessarily count.
[PATCH] Fix to watchpoint problems in traps.c
The patch in your 6-23-2000 submission (at least in the kernel mailing list archives) is not in the form typically used, namely the output of diff.
Please don't be discouraged, and try again.
Or better yet, set up a Slashcode based website, and moderate up the good patches. Unlike regular slashdot, there would be no Anonymous Cowards, and you could be banned for trolling.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't know about other programmers experiences but when I wrote Alan, I got a response. I wrote him not too long ago with some questions about the Linux I2O drivers he was working on (I was working on some myself for my company's Fibre Channel adapter). I don't think that any of my e-mails took more than a day to get a response.. heck, one was answered in one hour! These were not short, "Don't bother me." relies either; they gave complete answers to my questions.
I have also written Linus about porting to some new hardware my company was developing. Both times I got a full response in under three hours!
While these are just my stories I would find it hard to believe these guys are treating my e-mails as special. So if you have a question or bug fix, let them know. They may not be able to enter the code in write then but you should get a response pretty soon.
-- soldack
This would make a big difference. Even patches that are of the proper form are easy to miss among the hundreds of messages posted daily. The list is just too crazy.
The number of patches posted to the mailing list are significant, and most of them are very small, just a few lines. Since there are so many of them, and since they are quite distinct from the rest of the traffic on the list, they warrant their own mailing list.
Of course, the smart thing would be if everyone created a filter that separated messages with "[PATCH]" in the subject into their own folder, but who does that?
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
No, it means that because (a) significant time investment may be required and (b) kernel developers have many, many other emails and issues to deal with and (c) the original email, in this instance, didn't even identify who should look at it - because of all this, it really wasn't worth anyone's time unless they happened to have a particular interest in the bug in question.
> Noone ever bothered to acknowledge this guys effort. A simple "I looked, and you're a pinhead" would be enough. But all this guy got for his efforts was silence.
But even "I looked" takes time (did you read the original email, referenced elsewhere? I estimate a few hours work at least to really evaluate it properly.) There's a serious one-to-many effect at work here - few kernel developers, and many, many people with problems, agendas, and pet issues. And the reason there aren't a lot of kernel developers has nothing to do with the politics, and everything to do with who has the time and commitment to devote serious and ongoing effort to that kind of development.
> In my real job, when a peer spends this kind of time to identify a problem, I get spanked if I don't at least reply
You're making a lot of assumptions here. How does that peer communicate with you? Directly, or by dumping a message on a mailing list that he assumes you read? And if the item he's talking about doesn't fit the agenda for the project you're working to release, then your reply should be "sorry, can't work on that now." Which is the reply this issue might have gotten if the submitter had identified a person to submit it to.
> No wonder so many in the real world equate "Open Source" with "Childish Egomaniacs".
It seems to me that it takes a certain amount of self-centeredness to post a patch or bug report and then assume that you've been judged unkewl just because no-one answers. The issue you happen to have raised just may not be that interesting or important to anyone else. That's why I referred to "throwing a patch or bug report over the wall" - if you don't make any effort to actually find someone who might be interested, you shouldn't be offended when the person you haven't bothered to look for doesn't answer.
If you take silence from incredibly busy and dedicated people as a snub, then it's not them who are freezing you out, you're freezing yourself out. Step back and try to look at the situation objectively for a minute.
For the record, I have nothing to do with Linux development. I have worked as a lead developer on commercial projects with tens of thousands of users, though, so I have a bit of an idea what it's like to have hundreds of people all trying to get their own agendas realized.
Send Linus flowers for a week, then, camp outside his ofice at Transmeta, and ask him for change or code snippets everytime he walks by.
That should get his attention, and from there the shit rolls down hill!
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
I had this experience myself a few months ago - I was having a problem compiling 2.3.48 and .49 with Athlon-specific kernel features turned on. I wound up fixing the problem - it was trivial - and posted this patch to the mailing list.
No one got back to me directly, and indeed it took two revisions of the kernel (but at that point they were coming out about twice a week) to get the fix "officially" in.
But, on the other hand: a lot of people were happy that I posted the patch, and the fix did eventually get included -- or at least, the problem got noticed and someone fixed it, albeit a different way.
The moral of the story: the developers don't have time to answer every email personally, but posting problems - and patches - to the list will help others and it will cause the problems to eventually get noticed and fixed.
I've heard horror stories about people who have had to play 6-degrees of separation to get things into the right people. They have to find a friend who knows someone who met Alan Cox once, and hope to get each of their attention.
The fact that the linux kernel is so incredibly centralized isn't helping either. You want a patch in? It has to get to Linus. Which means you have to get to Alan/Maddog/etc. Which means you have to get to someone they know.
If there was a generalized system for hosting the kernel in CVS/Perforce/WebDAV/Whatever then things would be better. If there were people who would volunteer to first-screen-review any and all submissions things would help as well (envision patch@kernel.org going into a queue, and a volunteer who has "the ear" is able to review it and give first-cut comments on it, and possibly pass it up the chain to the next Saint in the hierarchy).
Ultimately, I hate to say this, but I see there being an eventual fork. Someone will take Linux, throw it up in CVS, allow checkins by quite a few people, and it's downhill from there. Maybe it'll be one of the distributors, maybe it'll be SGI (of the Gigantic Patch Library of Death), maybe it'll be IBM or even M$, or maybe it'll be some random college student who couldn't get the authors to listen. But it's pretty inevitable the way things are going.
If you're going to say the process is decentralized, then make it so! You don't have a reasonable engineering environment by having people spend twice as long trying to get someone to read their patch as they did writing it.
- Rejecting mail is not the same as disregarding. I don't think that the submitter meant to say that you "reject" it, but that you basically ignore it. whole different ball of wax there. I'm not saying you do or don't, but I think the the real issue is whether things that go to the main maintainers end up in a Big Black Hole.
- As previously pointed out, the author of said bug has both identified the bug and fixed it. It's not really a bug to be reported per se. There should be someplace to send patches, not just bug reports.
- The REPORTING-BUGS file part of 2.2.15 (what I'm currently running here, I checked) is way out date. It refers to mailing lists which don't exist, etc.
- Furthermore, it's clear that the author followed those instructions, and was still ignored. THAT'S the problem. He did what he was supposed to, and it's a big black hole.
- Finally, what happens if he contacts the maintainers (what happens if the maintainer is you?) and there's no response? Does his patch deserve to go into the abyss?
As much as I know that the people who maintain things are extremely overworked and underappreciated, there is a problem in that it's very difficult to get things into the kernel. Perhaps this needs to be discussed again.I've never had any problem getting bug fixes to the attention of the kernel developers. Just emailed the patch to the maintainer of said code and was done with it. If you wait a couple weeks with no action, try again. It also helps to put [PATCH] in the subject of your emails so they know it might be something useful.
And meanwhile, what is being done about the bug?
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