Context Around a year and a half ago, I’ve asked my former company for some time to work on an issue that was impacting the debugging capabilities in our project: gdbserver couldn’t debug multithreaded applications running on a PowerPC32 architecture. The connection to the gdbserver was broken and it couldn’t control the debug session anymore. Multiple people have already investigated this problem and I had a good starting point, but we still weren’t sure in which software component the issue lied: it could have been the toolchain, the gdbserver, the Linux kernel or the custom patches we applied on top of the kernel tree. We were quite far away from finding the root cause.
  • magicsaifa@feddit.de
    2·
    9 months ago

    I feel like the takeaway here should be that the experience of contributing to the project was not great. That’s it.

    There is value in complaining, even if you don’t have solutions. You can only make people aware of the consequences that their actions have caused by telling them.

    I don’t even take issue with him posting this publicly to his own Dev blog. I think its a perfectly fine piece of on-the-job experience OP has shared. Maybe in a few years he would like to come back to it with a different perspective.

    I do however think that OP posting this here (and apparently other boards) is a choice I don’t agree with. I think OP would have been better served writing a response email to the maintainer, explaining how they felt. Beyond that, what can one do?

    • lysdexic@programming.devEnglish
      136·
      9 months ago

      I feel like the takeaway here should be that the experience of contributing to the project was not great. That’s it.

      I don’t think this is a valid summary. I think the first-time contributor had a rather self-centered approach to the bugfix, and turned a run-of-the-mill bugfix in a huge drama-riddled personal attack on a FLOSS maintainer for no good reason.

      Only in the OP’s one-sided and vindictive account of the whole ordeal does the project maintainer have questionable behavior. The central theme of the one-sided account is also absurd, as if a kernel maintainer needs to wait around for first-timers to contribute a patch for them to “rob” it to have a commit to show for.

      The whole soap opera is so regrettable, and the OP comes out not looking good at all.