On 2020-W35-3 08:28 +0000, Frank Beuth wrote:
"Linux kernel development which is driven by plain-text email
discussion needs better or alternative collaborative tooling "to
bring in new contributors and maintain and sustain Linux in the
future," says Sarah Novotny, Microsoft's representative on the Linux
Foundation board.
Said tooling could be "a text-based, email-based patch system that
can then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown
up in the last five or ten years are more familiar with," she added.
...
Should it migrate toward something more like, say, issues and pull
requests on the Microsoft-owned GitHub? ???I???m not saying that
there will be a move in any time that I can see my crystal ball???s
broken but I do think there needs to be expansions in the way
people can enter that workflow,??? said Novotny.
???It is a fairly specific workflow that is a challenge for some
newer developers to engage with. As an example, my partner submitted
a patch to OpenBSD a few weeks ago, and he had to set up an entirely
new mail client which didn???t mangle his email message to HTML-ise
or do other things to it, so he could even make that one patch.
That???s a barrier to entry that???s pretty high for somebody who
may want to be a first-time contributor.???"
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
OMG, LOL!
Why OpenBSD is to blame when Gmail -- after so many years -- still
doesn't have proper support for sending text-based attachments
the right way?
Or the ability to include patches in message body,
without tabs being mangled into spaces?
Or maybe we now have to switch from tabs to spaces in style(9)
and all our code, because buggy software written in the last
Z years cannot support tabs properly?
My prof at the uni used to say: Chemistry Saves Lives. The joke
goes is that it's a mandatory requirement for the nursing major, so,
seeding out those incapable of comprehension is not a bad thing. (TM)
Hey, guess what?! I, too, had to learn how to send mail in a way
to not have the patches mangled. It's not rocket science.
It's kind of the basic knowledge when kernel hacking is at stake.
Maybe if there were minimum qualifications to be a software
developer nowadays, we wouldn't have dataloss incidents like
the Adobe Lightroom iOS App Update deleting all the photos
from your phone, without you the end user having any recourse.
C.
