Conor Dooley
Posts
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144Followers
178I like cycling, powerlifting, bad video games and metal.
Otherwise, I occupy my time with various bits in RISC-V land.
~useless, placeholder, website: https://www.conchuod.ie/
@marcan I'm not trying to defend any silliness, but I do at least understand why people make the comments at times.
In the non-mantainer case in particular, I often feel like there is "over-eagerness" involved too, and feel guilty of that myself at times as a non-maintainer reviewer of something. I suspect that there's a lot of heart in the right place involved without seeing the other side of it.
>At some point it's just time to let go because the experience for the submitter is just awful and it's not worth it.
Yup. I'm unimportant and in a small corner of the world, but probably worth seeing what can be improved in said corner.
In the non-mantainer case in particular, I often feel like there is "over-eagerness" involved too, and feel guilty of that myself at times as a non-maintainer reviewer of something. I suspect that there's a lot of heart in the right place involved without seeing the other side of it.
>At some point it's just time to let go because the experience for the submitter is just awful and it's not worth it.
Yup. I'm unimportant and in a small corner of the world, but probably worth seeing what can be improved in said corner.
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@marcan
>To be clear, reasonable code quality comments aren't the problem, and helping out less experienced folks in a kind way is a tangential (but also important and frequently related) issue.
Yah, agreed. Especially the "frequently related" bit.
I was interpreting the "every new contributor has to build that list from scratch" with a bit of a focus on the "how to deal with them" bit & maybe I focused on that part too much as it kinda resonated with me. I just don't wanna be someone that people have to learn to deal with!
w.r.t the second paragraph:
I didn't think you were suggesting that people should take bad code. Sorry if it came across that way at all.
The alignment thing you suggested is a good example - I never know if I can or can't change that stuff in a patch that I add something, which is just silly.
Another one that I find silly is "that's not the right way to do x", without any hints as to what the right way might be. Certainly feel like the knowledge about how linux works is being gatekept in situations like that.
I've seen at least one of the interactions you're referring to (and probably can guess who the list.txt maintainer is).
One thing that is kinda frustrating is not knowing which maintainers are willing to fix up x, y or z on application and which want a respin for a $subject change.
Reviewing patches as a non-maintainer is a bit of an odd spot. If you don't mention some nit in v5 of a trivial driver, there's a chance noone spots it & if there's a v6 it'd not change. Not the end of the world I guess though most of the time.
I feel bad as said reviewer when someone re-submits to fix something that could likely be fixed on application, but not as if I can speak for the actual maintainer.
>To be clear, reasonable code quality comments aren't the problem, and helping out less experienced folks in a kind way is a tangential (but also important and frequently related) issue.
Yah, agreed. Especially the "frequently related" bit.
I was interpreting the "every new contributor has to build that list from scratch" with a bit of a focus on the "how to deal with them" bit & maybe I focused on that part too much as it kinda resonated with me. I just don't wanna be someone that people have to learn to deal with!
w.r.t the second paragraph:
I didn't think you were suggesting that people should take bad code. Sorry if it came across that way at all.
The alignment thing you suggested is a good example - I never know if I can or can't change that stuff in a patch that I add something, which is just silly.
Another one that I find silly is "that's not the right way to do x", without any hints as to what the right way might be. Certainly feel like the knowledge about how linux works is being gatekept in situations like that.
I've seen at least one of the interactions you're referring to (and probably can guess who the list.txt maintainer is).
One thing that is kinda frustrating is not knowing which maintainers are willing to fix up x, y or z on application and which want a respin for a $subject change.
Reviewing patches as a non-maintainer is a bit of an odd spot. If you don't mention some nit in v5 of a trivial driver, there's a chance noone spots it & if there's a v6 it'd not change. Not the end of the world I guess though most of the time.
I feel bad as said reviewer when someone re-submits to fix something that could likely be fixed on application, but not as if I can speak for the actual maintainer.
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@marcan @ljs
Airing grievances about maintainers aside, somewhere to check per-subsystem "quirks" would actually be helpful.
You've been around longer than I have, so I suppose you're aware of https://docs.kernel.org/process/maintainer-handbooks.html
although unfortunately that only covers two subsystems!
I guess in RISC-V land we also have https://docs.kernel.org/riscv/patch-acceptance.html that defines some constraints on submissions.
Creating a maintainer-handbook on someone's behalf seems a bit hostile, but perhaps having a list with "quirks" would encourage people to either drop or properly document them...
There's subsystems where the maintainer doesn't reply to patches, there's no git etc tree & the only way to know if something has been applied is when it shows up in -rc1!
If that confuses consistent contributors, documenting it for something like prolific like your apple-silicon stuff that, I assume, attracts new contributors seems helpful.
Airing grievances about maintainers aside, somewhere to check per-subsystem "quirks" would actually be helpful.
You've been around longer than I have, so I suppose you're aware of https://docs.kernel.org/process/maintainer-handbooks.html
although unfortunately that only covers two subsystems!
I guess in RISC-V land we also have https://docs.kernel.org/riscv/patch-acceptance.html that defines some constraints on submissions.
Creating a maintainer-handbook on someone's behalf seems a bit hostile, but perhaps having a list with "quirks" would encourage people to either drop or properly document them...
There's subsystems where the maintainer doesn't reply to patches, there's no git etc tree & the only way to know if something has been applied is when it shows up in -rc1!
If that confuses consistent contributors, documenting it for something like prolific like your apple-silicon stuff that, I assume, attracts new contributors seems helpful.
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Conor Dooley
conor
I guess since there is no quote retweet here,
https://social.kernel.org/notice/ARLXuuUYGeIWtYMHbs
>every new contributor has to build that list from scratch and suffer until they figured it out.
Whenever I write something critical I think of one of the reviews I received early on, for something that was admittedly sub-par, and hope not to come across the way that email did.
https://social.kernel.org/notice/ARLXuuUYGeIWtYMHbs
>every new contributor has to build that list from scratch and suffer until they figured it out.
Whenever I write something critical I think of one of the reviews I received early on, for something that was admittedly sub-par, and hope not to come across the way that email did.
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@bjorntopel I found out that the Monday after is a new bank holiday here.. I suppose I shall see you there :)
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@nathanchance "developers will introduce [-Wmaybe-uninitialized] inadvertently and not realize it because GCC never told them about it" tbh stuff like this made me swap to clang-by-default. Got sick of lkp complaining about stuff that gcc missed.
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Conor Dooley
conor
Heh, this would've been nice to have attended year ago:
https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/pwm/
"The audience learns the general concept of PWMs, about the corner cases in their usage and driver design, and how to avoid the common pitfalls often pointed out to authors of new PWM drivers during the review process."
https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/pwm/
"The audience learns the general concept of PWMs, about the corner cases in their usage and driver design, and how to avoid the common pitfalls often pointed out to authors of new PWM drivers during the review process."
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@gmarkall You running mainline + patches, or the tree they ship? Either way, yell if something that should work doesn't? I figure stuff ship works for but probably hasn't see diverse use.
They sent me over some docs, so I was able to look a bit more closely at the power management unit patchset - there's not a lot of drivers to compare against there so that one is mainly what worried me.
They sent me over some docs, so I was able to look a bit more closely at the power management unit patchset - there's not a lot of drivers to compare against there so that one is mainly what worried me.
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@gmarkall Ahh, figured. My internal gauge of LLVM build times comes from running https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/tc-build/build-llvm.py which builds all archs by default. 2 hours (with headroom to improve) for the single target build sounds promising in terms of being able to do native building of things.
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