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.
Whew, here I was thinking it might be cool to try to contribute to some project, maybe even Linux! This thread shall serve as my reminder to never do that because that’s for god-tier emotionless techbros only.
[Sarcasm] Remember, being a dick to people is the only way to ensure that you’re caring about the code enough!
I’ve stumbled upon this blog post first in HackerNews, and the comments there make it quite clear that, even though it wouldn’t hurt to give more credit than merely reporting a bug, the author’s submission was flawed and subpar, and the rewrite that went in was undoubtedly better in every way.
I don’t think all this drama is waranted or justifiable. Also, if the first whiff of adversity bothers you and any feedback in a PR other than enthusiastic praise leaves you with a sour taste then collaborative work might not be for you, both as a participant and as someoje that everyone else has to endure.