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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

The fellow who is being named in this particular PR has been _quite_ busy lately, submitting mostly typo fixes and whitespace fixes: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=f%3Athunder.leizhen

Sometimes their patches aren't even valid - they tried to fix "borken" to "broken" and the maintainer was not happy: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YK3wOkX6I78j73zD@gmail.com/ (this does come down to not being familiar with this particular bit of slang - but they push back and argue a bit which doesn't help)

Sometimes the maintainers are not happy just getting a patch that fixes one line of whitespace: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210608105943.2376328c@oasis.l...

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> they tried to fix "borken" to "broken" and the maintainer was not happy […] this does come down to not being familiar with this particular bit of slang - but they push back and argue a bit which doesn't help

I did not know "borken" either, but I am aware of "borked" and "broken". Based on that email thread someone else already attempted to fix this in the past.

Maybe it's an indication that the so-called "joke" is not actually funny and it should be adjusted to either "borked" or "broken" to not cause others to send the same fix?

Agreed. While the kernel developers can obviously do whatever they want in terms of in-house jokes, the claim that "this is just normal usage, Google it" is a bit ridiculous. They could have just said, "we know it's wrong, we just thought it's funny".

("Borken" is a city in Germany, that's my only association with it )

They could also say "this is just a trap to waste the time of people who want to increase their Kernel commit counts. try again".

> ("Borken" is a city in Germany, that's my only association with it )

Being German myself it's also the plural of "Borke" (i.e. the "bark" of a tree): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borke

I can't remember every saying or reading / hearing anything that involved a multitude of barks though, hence why, having lived in NRW, that association is still more prominent in my mind.

Here is this person's commit history for the last year for additional context:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=auth...

They do appear to contribute regularly enough (relatively speaking) and based on some of the busfactor metrics, they are the sole maintainer or main maintainers for about 50 files.

And if you look at their one line change commits, they do seem to be valid:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=comm...

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the tool for the links above

> And if you look at their one line change commits, they do seem to be valid

By construction, yes. You're only looking at their commits that were merged into Linus's tree.

Yes you are right. I was more establishing this person's successful contributions and that they appear to provide meaningful contributions. What is happening now with all the new proposed changes that is causing a stir is something that I really can't speak too since there is no easy way to navigate their proposed changes.

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