this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
313 points (99.1% liked)
Programming
16977 readers
167 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'll also throw out: aging infrastructure, build systems, coding practices, etc.
I looked into contributing to the kernel - it's already an uphill battle to understand such a large, complex piece of software written almost entirely in C - but then you also need to subscribe to busy mailing lists and contribute code via email, something I've never done at 30 and I'm betting most of the younger generation doesn't even know is possible. I know it "works" but I'm really doubting it's the most efficient way to be doing things in 2024 - there's a reason so many infrastructure tools have been developed over the years.
The barriers to entry for a lot of projects is way too high, and IMO a lot of existing "grey" maintainers, somewhat understandably, have no interest in changing their processes after so much time. But if you make it too hard to contribute, no one will bother.
How do you contribute code through a mailing list? Like I don’t understand…
Found a blog post that gives a quick overview of how to do git via email in general: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/05/09/how-to-submit-a-patch-by-email-2023-edition
So at least from my understanding you'd make your changes, email the contents of the patch to the maintainer, and then they'd apply it on their side, do code review, email you comments, etc. until it was in an acceptable state.
There's also the full kernel development wiki that goes into all the specifics: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.16/process/howto.html
(I never got through the whole thing)
ELI5: Git has tools built-in to put your changes into emails and send them. People can either bring them in or see the diff in the emails.
Reading and interactive tutorials:
Awkwardly. Pretty much generate a patch and email it as an attachment.
by writing your diffs with red and black ink, like the Aztecs did