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Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

No disrespect to Peter Zijlstra, I'm sure he has been a lot more impactful on the open source community than I will ever be but his immmediate reply caught my attention:

>> [Being tracked in this bug which contains much more detail: >> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1696 ]

> Can I please just get the detail in mail instead of having to go look at random websites?

Maybe it's me but if I did boot boot linux 292.612 times to find a bug, you might as well click a link to a repository of a major open source project on a major git hosting service.

Is it really that weird to ask people online to check a website? Maybe I don't know the etiquette of these mail lists so this is a geniune question. I guess it is better to keep all conversation in a single place, would that be the intention?

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I am only guessing here, but I assume it's so the content of the mailing list archive remains. If a linked website goes down or changes at any time in the future, then that archive is no longer fulfilling its purpose of archiving important information.

I'm pretty much 100% sure that's the reason, and a good one at that. Mailing lists are the lifeblood of a lot of big open source projects.

The irony being that he presumably wants more information on the mailing list to keep a good archive, while not giving enough information for people to understand that and follow the advice later.

If that was the reason it would have been best to state that in the request.

> Can I please just get the detail in mail so that it is archived with the list?

Of course you can't expect every email written to be perfect, it is generally treated as an informal medium in these settings. But stating the reason helps people understand your motives and serve them better.

I think that hardcode kernel devs already know the reasons, and there is no point in raising it again. For you it might seem like a random requirement, but it's because of lack of familiarity.

i think in that case explaination is needed even more, if you are hardcore dev, then no one need to remind you about such rule, on the other hand if you are not so familiar with those rules yet, explanation would be very helpful

It was completely obvious to me, and I'm not a Linux committer.

Any bug of the form:

Hi, I'm sending this via official channels, but see [external thing].

Is going to immediately bitrot. For instance, in stack overflow, for something like 10% of answers, you'll see people saying to explain what a link says instead of just linking.

That's why you preserve everything that's useful in the commit message for the fix.

This is the same logic in avoiding link-only answers on Stack Overflow. They’re both good rules.

Not only the link itself - but if the email body /attachments contains the details - it is also easier to write a good reply by selectively quoting from the mail. So it isn't just for the first mail, but for the follow-up discussion thread(s).

I was a bit short in the original description, but luckily we've since reached an understanding on how to try to reproduce this bug.

Unfortunately he's not been able to reproduce it, even though I can reproduce it on several machines here (and it's been independently reproduced by other people at Red Hat). We do know that it happens much less frequently on Intel hardware than AMD hardware (likely just because of subtle timing differences), and he's of course working at Intel.

It's LKML. The volume of that list is insane, and technical discussion is very much the point, so they'd expect you to explain the problem right there, where people can quote parts of it, and comment on each part separately.

Many of the participants may also be reading it in a terminal emulator with no web browser nearby.

Are they on a PDP-11 or a dumb terminal?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

Used this daily for many years. Was great when connecting to the internet was only practical via a shell.

Did you try it on this site?

All of the comments/updates on the bug report are loaded by javascript and don't work for me in lynx or elinks.

Do you mean hacker news as "this site"? HN seems to be server side rendered, so it should display well without Javascript.

I think they meant <https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1696>.

> Are they on...?

I've met people who seriously do use dumb terminals and other people who have seriously discussed using a PDP-11.

So, while your question might sound sarcastic, the answer is definitely yes.

Nerds gonna nerd. Nothing wrong with that.

I personally don't like going to gitlab or github because I don't like the businesses behind them. That's another point irrespective of whether I'm browsing in a terminal or ancient device.

You recognize that using hardware from the 70s means you're in a single digit minority right?

You can't possibly expect the world to cater to such affectations

They might be using linux. After all, it's just a glorified news group reader for starving/cheap undergrads.

On some favors of Linux (gnome), it's possible to right click on a link that appears in a terminal emulator and open it.

However there are many things that all need to work:

Firefox (or similar) installed (using a snap??)

DNS must work Firewall allow it Preferably open the browser on a second monitor for easy work flow.

Oh and to click the link, the programmer may need to find his wireless mouse because he may not have used it in days.

maybe those people should rethink how to do stuff in 2023.

Their software, their workflow. "Bend to it or pick something else" seems entirely fine to me.

this is not really true for open source, I think. since it's collaborative I think it's fair to expect people to be able to open a GitHub link

I run OpenBSD on most of my systems. The OpenBSD development team collaborates using cvs instead of git because it fits their workflow well. If I wanted to collaborate with them, I'd use cvs too – and if I wanted to move them to git I'd do it after becoming a core contributor, not before. If I'm going to send bug reports & patches here and there, I'm going to do it in a way that makes it easy for Theo and team to review.

This is very much a Chesterton's fence topic, I think. Linux developers have settled on a workflow that works for them, and if you want to get time from the people who are doing the bulk of the work it's fair to expect you to work within their requests.

This dude literally spent days doing their work. Rebooted Linux nearly 300k to find their fuckup. Then they have the infantile reaction to complain about clicking a link?

you're wrong. instead you should adopt the standards of the group you're attempting to join. Getting "tourist who complains about customs of country they visit" vibes from this comment

It’s a gitlab link, not github. And it isn’t reasonable in this context. GitHub hosts a lot of open source projects but it is not the only place where open source happens. That's kinda the point of open source, and especially of git.

Git itself is a satellite project of the Linux kernel. It can work without the web at all. That someone EEE’d it so hard that even Microsoft couldn’t resist is no reason to expect the kernel devs to change their workflow.

You’re welcome to go tell the Linux kernel devs what they are doing wrong. Fuck around and find out as the kids say. Or start the Zolnux project and see how far that goes chasing shiny objects.

My suspicion is that it's not about reading the bug info once, but having the information in the mailing-list, which is the archive of record for kernel bugs.

Asking to click a link in an email is unreasonable in this context. The email list is the official channel and project participants are expected to use it. They are not expected to have a web browser. The popularity of the linked site is irrelevant. Part of filing good bug reports is understanding a project’s communication style. A link to supplementary information is fine. But like a Stack Overflow answer the email should stand on its own.

Many kernel people really are stuck in their ways like that. They don't want to leave their Mutt (e-mail client) at any cost. I recall some are even to this day running using a text console (ie. no X11 or Wayland).

Don't blame them. I'm fed up of browsers using gigs of ram to display kb of data. :(

Maybe it’s so the mail threads keep the full records.

Yes, he should have just went and looked there. Github is not a "random website".

The link is to gitlab, not github. But any website is inappropriate in this context because it’s not permanent. The email list is, at least as far as the project is concerned.

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