Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

On Thu, 16 Jul 2015 19:24:35 +0300
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:

> Seriously, what is the actual problem?  Who bites the heads off newbies
> for sport?  I ask because the first patch submission is usually treated
> with helpfulness and tolerance, at least where I've been on the cc list.

So, obviously, I was going for dramatic effect in my other posting.
"Biting the heads off newbies" doesn't ordinarily happen.  I think the
whole Nick episode has shown how tolerant we can be, actually.  The point
I was trying to make is that there isn't one way to submit a patch to the
kernel, there's a hundred ways to submit to various subsystems.

Over on linux-kernel, I just saw a newish developer being politely told
that a patch was unacceptable because the local variable declarations
were not in reverse-Christmas-tree order.  That's not in CodingStyle, and
it's certainly not a universal rule in the kernel; it's just one of those
things you have to know if you wander into certain scary neighborhoods.

I don't know if there's anything to be done about it, but I do think that
this thicket of weird local rules is intimidating to new developers, even
if missteps are dealt with politely.

jon