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Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

Honestly WTF would a "newbie and non-expert" have to do with sending KERNEL PATCHES.

Personally I don't think you can become an expert in Linux kernel programming without sending patches. So over the long term, if you don't let non-experts submit patches then no new experts will ever be created, the existing ones will die or move on, and there won't be any experts at all. At that point the project will die.

but Greg had the correct that patches sent were in many part easily seeable as bad for any persons who are knowing C. each person must have some time new to C, and some time new to kernel, but those times should not be same.

Nobody is an expert on every subject. You could have PhD level knowledge of the theory behind a specific filesystem or allocator but know next to nothing about the underlying hardware.

My point is that "we're newbies on the topic of the Linux Kernel, so be friendly to us when sending Linux Kernel patches" is the worst argument I've heard about anything in years.

I'd say that's a very valid argument in principle. If you want to start contributing to the Linux kernel, you'll have to start somewhere - but you can't start refactoring entire subsystems, rather you'll start with small patches and it's very natural to make minor procedural and technical mistakes at that stage. [1]

However, in this particular case, I agree that it is not a valid argument since it is doubtful whether the beginning kernel contributor's patches are in good faith.

[1] Torvalds encouraging new contributors to send in trivial patches back in 2004: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255

You have plenty of places to start. Fork and patch away. You don't start by patching the distribution the entire world uses.

It's like "be kind I'm new to the concept of airplanes, let me fly this airplane with hundreds of passengers"

How is it possible that you have a PhD in filesystems but you don't know how to write an acceptable patch for the Linux kernel? That's what I call a scam PhD.

So they can tell companies "I am a contributor to the Linux kernel"..there are charlatans are in every field. Assuming this wasn't malicious and "I'm a newbie" isn't just a cover.

I had a professor in college who gave out references to students and made his assignments so easy a middle school kid could do the homework. He never said why but I'm 100% positive he was gaming the reviews sent back so that he'd stay hired on as an instructor while he built up his lesson plans. I think he figured out how to game it pretty quick seeing as the position had like 3 instructors before him whom students universally hated for either being ridiculously strict or lying through their teeth about even knowing what the difference between public and private meant.

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