On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:29 AM, Filipe Manana <fdman...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Simon Quigley <tsimo...@ubuntu.com> wrote: >>> 1) You don't learn anything by doing them. You don't learn nothing >>> about btrfs internals, filesystems in general, kernel programming in >>> general, general programming in C, etc. It ends up being only a waste >>> of time for you; >> >> It is useful for one reason. If you would like to get used to the workflow >> of kernel development, > > No, that's silly. Generating a patch file and sending it to the > mailing list is very trivial. There's not much to learn there. > Certainly you don't need to send around 10 whitespace/style patches > for that. 1 is enough to "test the waters". And most people learn that > by observing others for a while too. > >> this seems to be useful for a lot of people. In fact, Linus himself has >> encouraged this. > > Whitespace/style patches I doubt. He probably encourages for small > cleanup/optimizations as the first patch, like he did recently at > https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/9/15/919. That's something that requires > some thinking and understanding. Now running checkpatch and fix its > warnings, doesn't require any skill at all. > What were you planning? Sending more 100 patches, each one to fix a > different style issue for each function? There's probably hundreds or > thousands more style/whitespace "issues" to fix in btrfs alone. > > Just think about what you want to accomplish. It's normal to not know > what do initially, I think everyone goes through that phase, specially > if not employed to work on btrfs (or whatever project interests you). > Just read code, find issues in it, make changes for your own testing, > read bug reports and performance issue reports here in the list and in > kernel's bugzilla - some bugs might be easy to fix, other might > require very deep knowledge of the internals or no one figured out yet > how to reproduce. Or run xfstests and filesystem stress testing tools > to find problems (there's plenty of races, deadlocks, etc that happen > often and no one knows about them yet). Over time you'll find plenty > of things to do, that make you learn a lot and do something useful for > users and other developers.
I guess you have a point, I apologize. Overall though, I am curious as to what Chris Mason has to say about this. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
