Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 22 May 2008 02:32:25 +0200 | From | "Jesper Juhl" <> | Subject | Re: CFD: (was [PATCH] Standard indentation of arguments) |
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2008/5/22 Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org>: > On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 01:46:28AM +0200, Jesper Juhl wrote: >>... >> 2. How to find things to work on as a beginner >>... >> Finding bugs to fix is easy. Here are some ways to find useful work to >> do: >>... > > But fixing them is not so easy... > > Sorry for being destructive, but we do not have easy coding tasks > for newbies. > A) You are not being destructive, you are doing exactely what I hoped people would do, which is comment on my draft so I can make it better :)
B) You are absolutely right in saying that fixing bugs is not (always) easy. But it's a fact that many people ask questions along the lines of "where do I start?", "where can I find something useful to work on?", "I want to learn, is there some code that needs attention I can start reading?" and similar. I'm simply trying to help the people who ask that sort of questions by providing them with a source of stuff to attack. Whether or not someone will be able to fix a bug is a different issue to whether or not a person can find somewhere to start getting into kernel development in a useful way.
> If it's easy it's already fixed,
True, and then again, not always. Do 100 randconfig builds and I'm willing to bet that at least a handful of the compiler errors or warnings you encounter can be fixed by simply including a header, moving an #ifdef, fixing a cast, fixing a printk format string or similar. There are many difficult to fix bugs in the kernel, but there's also still some low-hanging fruit left (and I suspect there will always be).
>and dozens of people following your > advice to look at e.g. compile or sparse warnings will only generate > much noise, but they'll have a hard time finding anything they are > capable to fix. > You may be right, but personally I'm not so sure. The kernel is a large project and we have many people who want to get involved but give up when hitting the very first barrier to entry; finding somewhere to start. Sure, there will be some noise, but I would hope that there would also be many good (if somewhat trivial) patches - and once people get one or two trivial patches accepted they may be encouraged to delve in deeper and do more useful work. Those that can't even fix a simple warning or missing include file error will probably give up whether or not we provide this document or not.
-- Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com> Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html Plain text mails only, please http://www.expita.com/nomime.html
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