Don't know where to start linux kernel programming

[greg@kroah.com (Greg KH)]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 12:59:31PM -0400, valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Aug 2017 12:48:42 -0400, Cindy-Sue Causey said:
> 
> > An observation that may just mean I haven't stumbled upon it yet is
> > that it would be nice to... stumble upon... a list of kernel problems
> > that *kernelnewbies* could cut their teeth on. I do understand that
> > this is a naive wish list item due to the nearly every nanosecond
> > changing complexity of things. :)
> 
> Such a thing existed 10 or 15 years ago.  Unfortunately for the newbies, there
> are very few problems that newbies can attack, because if they were that
> simple, somebody would already have *done* them.

Not really, please look at drivers/staging/*/TODO there are loads of
simple things left to do, with more being added all the time (a huge new
wireless driver just landed that could use lots of cleanups.)

> One thing in particular that pretty much killed the kernel-janitors project
> (which did cleanup of code) was a change in the rules for kernel API changes.
> Before, somebody could add a new/changed API, and the janitors would change all
> the uses in the tree.  We now require that a patch series that changes an API
> has to also fix all in-tree uses of the API.

That's always been the rule, you could never break the build.  What is
better now in that people who do the new API usually fix everything up
at the same time because they want to drop the old API sooner rather
than later.

thanks,

greg k-h