Hacker News Reader

Comment by finnthehuman | Hacker News Reader

I always thought it was a pretty blatant "vibe check" to filter out people who are so uncomfortable with software that they can't customize their environment to create an email workflow that works for them.

View on HN

That sounds about right - the medium is the message. If you can't stand the clunky-but-working, decades-old, patch process, you probably won't stand the clunky-but-working decades-old code.

I'm grateful the kernel still supports MIPS, which means an old appliance of mine still works perfectly fine and is upgradable. I would be cery sad if someone were to rip-out support of an old MIPS arch, just because it's old and unwieldy

I've contributed to a couple of projects that use email based workflows. I can customize my environment, but it takes a lot of time, and I would rather do something else than figure out how to filter the firehose of a mailing list to the few emails I actually care about, or learn how to use a new email client that is slightly better and handling patches.

The first few times, it took me longer to figure out how to send a patch than it did to fix the bug I was writing a patch for.

But you only have to figure that out once. Amortized over many contributions the cost is essentially nothing.

But the initial cost is what determines whether the first patch will ever be sent, so the amortization may never happen.

I guess technically that’s true, but it cannot possibly take long to learn how to use `git format-patch`, and everyone should already know how to attach a file to an email. Even if you have to spend half an hour reading the entire output of `git format-patch --help`, is that really enough to prevent you from sending your first patch?

Yes.

Ok, let me get this straight. You diagnosed a problem in the Linux kernel. You debugged it and figured out how to fix it. You edited the kernel source code, recompiled it, and tested your fix. After all that, if you have to read a man page you’ll just give up?

That’s seriously lame.

What time is more valuable than that, and I don’t owe it to anyone.

By that same token, there’s no reason for you to expect kernel developers to adopt a different way of working either. Their time is even more valuable than yours.

We only have so many hours in our sadly finite lives.

Can't or won't? Surely what you just read would make you reconsider?

shrug maybe "won't" is a false positive, maybe a true positive, I dunno man, not my vibe check.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com