Re: I am a volunteer

Stefan Richter
2008-05-26T14:37:04Z

Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 08:23:22PM +0200, Davi Leal wrote:
>> Adrian Bunk wrote:
>> > The easiest and very valuable task is testing the kernel as described at
>> > http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelTesters
>>
>> I am more motivated to do development than testing.
>
> And who do you think will test your dev then ?
>
> Testing very quickly involves development because you will notice bugs
> first, then missing chunks of code to handle special conditions, and by
> this time you will feel much better with kernel internals and will have
> no problem starting on more complex tasks.
[...]

I second what Adrian and Willy wrote, because that's basically how I
became involved. A driver subsystem which I wanted to use didn't work
quite 100%, so I always checked out the newest sources of the subsystem
development repo and reported open issues or regressions. When (a)
developers vanished and (b) I became more confident I started to submit
patches myself.

Another conclusion from that is that you should pick an area which
genuinely interests you, i.e. a driver or protocol or whatever which you
actually use yourself frequently. That's a lot more motivating than to
pick a project from a todo-list at random.
--
Stefan Richter
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