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.
  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    398·
    1 year ago

    Regardless of deserved credit your reputation in the kernel community will be that of a drama llama at least for awhile. Making a mountain out of a mole hill, will be remembered, does not play well with others.

    I’m not saying you don’t deserve credit, but the method you went about emoting over this event will be noticed by community managers, not just the kernel community. Be aware of how your reputation is developed. Lots of us had to eat some humble pie in our career development.

    If you had spun this in your personal blog on how you helped fix a kernel bug, and spoke of the positives, then you would be seen as more of a team player, plays well with others, doesn’t get bogged down on small issues.

    Our character isn’t defined when times are good, but with how we deal with adversity.

    • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
      102·
      1 year ago

      There’s a difference between being a team player and a subservient pawn though - if the maintainer wanted to play as a team they would’ve suggested changes to the patch and accepted OP’s PR. As it happens they didn’t as they clearly have some sort of a power/superiority complex or something, or at best are dismissive of others to the detriment of the project they work on