Marcelo Toledo

Some guy started studying the Linux Kernel, gently Linus rejected all of his patches, he obviously got frustrated and asked him a question:

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Jesper Juhl wrote:
>
> Should I just stop attemting to make these trivial cleanups/fixes/whatever
> patches? are they more noice than gain? am I being a pain to more skilled
> people on lkml or can you all live with my, sometimes quite ignorant,
> patches?
> I do try to learn from the feedback I get, and I like to think that my
> patches are gradually getting a bit better, but if I’m more of a bother
> than a help I might as well stop.

Linus saw the frustration of the poor boy and replied with a motivational message:

To me, the biggest thing with small patches is not necessarily the patch itself. I think that much more important than the patch is the fact that people get used to the notion that they can change the kernel - not just on an intellectual level (”I understand that the GPL means that I have the right to change my kernel”), but on a more practical level (”Hey, I did that small change”).

And whether it ends up being the right thing or not, that’s how everybody starts out. It’s simply not possible to “get into” the kernel without starting out small, and making mistakes. So I very much encourage it, even if I often don’t have the time to actually worry about small patches, and I try to get suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hother developers like Rusty to try to acts as quality control and a “gathering place”.

Btw, this is why even “trivial patches” really do take time - they often have trivial mistakes in them, and it’s not just because there are more inexperienced people doing them - most of _my_ mistakes tend to be at the truly idiotic level, just because it “looked obvious”, and then there’s something that I miss.

So at one level I absolutely _hate_ trivial patches: they take time and effort to merge, and individually the patch itself is often not really obviously “worth it”. But at the same time, I think the trivial patches are among the most important ones - exactly because they are the “entry” patches for every new developer. I just try really hard to find somebody else to worry about them

(It’s not a thankful job, btw, exactly because it _looks_ so trivial. It’s easy to point to 99 patches that are absolutely obvious, and complain about the fact that they haven’t been merged. But they take time to merge exactly because of that one patch that _did_ look obvious, but wasn’t. And actually, it’s usually not 99:1, it’s usually more like 10:1 or something).

So please don’t stop. Yes, those trivial patches _are_ a bother. Damn, they are _horrible_. But at the same time, the devil is in the detail, and they are needed in the long run. Both the patches themselves, and the people that grew up on them.

Linus

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It’s growing the number of unsolicited calls I received lately, once I went to a night club and they asked for my phone number, biggest mistake of my life, seems like they are going to call me every weekend. I’ve just created a contact called Spam in my iPhone, now I just want a replica of that website that stores spammers phones and a tools to sync with iPhone. Save us Phoneman!

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“About 18 months ago I posted the following question to Ask Slashdot: ‘How do you organize a home library with 3,500 books?’ I have read all the responses, reviewed most of the available software, and come up with a good solution described in the article The Library Problem. This article discusses various cataloging schemes, reviews cheap barcode scanners, and outlines a complete solution for organizing your home library. Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer.”

Source: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1320207&tid=192

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I think blog comments aren’t productive, that’s why I don’t allow them. A lot has been said, I’ll just quote what I agree with:

“…to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog…. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones…. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment.” Dave Winer ideas about comments on blogs.

“The important thing to notice here is that Dave does not see blog comments as productive to the free exchange of ideas. They are a part of the problem, not the solution. You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they’ll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you’ll move up in PageRank, and you’ll have influence and your ideas will have power.”

“When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words. Look at this innocent post on a real estate blog. By comment #6 you’re already seeing complete noise. By #13 you have someone cursing and saying “go kill yourself.” On a real estate blog. #18 and #23 have launched into a middle eastern nuclear conflageration which continues for 100 posts.” Joel Spolsky

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