Midwits on HN and Reddit sympathize with him.
tl;dr
A guy found a bug in kernel on an obscure architecture no one cares about (PowerPC32) and submitted a patch. The maintainer decided the patch was no good and fixed it by himself, crediting the guy with "Reported-by" tag. A year later, the guy wrote a blogpost crying that wasn't enough.
Links
HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37671991
A lie in the blogpost
I was also open to working with him, addressing his feedback and sending subsequent versions of patches. He said (paraphrasing):
Sorry, I like my version better. If you want to be a Linux kernel contributor, here's an issue you could fix.
I found this really perplexing and insulting.
The funny thing is, the above "paraphrase" is actually a lie and the kernel maintainer was very polite and respectful. This is what he actually said:
Hi Ariel,
I've added Christophe to Cc who works on ppc32.
I haven't actually reproduced the crash with gdbserver, but I have a test case which shows the bug, so I've been able to confirm it and test a fix.
Thanks for your patch, but I wanted to fix it differently. Can you try the patch below and make sure it fixes the bug for you?
I've also attached the test case I've been using.
Christophe are you able to test these on some 32-bit machines? I've tested it in qemu and on one 32-bit machine I have here, but some more real testing would be good.
If the patch works then I'll need to do manual back ports for several of the stable kernels, and then once those are ready I will publish the patch.
cheers
Comment spotlight
The maintainer did exactly what they usually do, I see absolutely nothing unexpected here, note that this was an unsolicited patch sent to a security mailing list.
If this is what the maintainer usually does then the maintainer is a wanker. If they leave the project, the project won't be losing a good person.
Indeed, maintainers are disposable. It's easy to find a codecel willing to put years of quality work into an obscure part of the kernel, for free.
Random users and drive-by contributors are much more important to the health of the project. They are much more likely to be a good person. We must not let them feel unwelcome, at any cost.
Agreed. I see the job of an experienced maintainer as a facilitator who should bend over backward to help other people's contributions land cleanly. The help often involves feedback on style and architecture consistency, but a sign of a great maintainer is someone who credits others, and mostly stays behind the curtain making sure everything goes smoothly.
You WILL bend over backwards for random people sending their shitty patches and you WILL love it.
Amazing how the hostility is perpetuating all through HN here as well.
I have seen (and sadly self experienced!) this kind of story way too often. And let me tell you this: This guy is now burned by this bad interaction and is successfully shooed away.
And some folks wonder why "nerds" and "geeks" are seen as socially inapt...
I don't even think that Mr. Ellerman had any malicious intents. But it just shows again, that the so called people skills are nothing to be neglected when choosing leading figures.
To paraphrase George Carlin: "It's a big club. And you're not in it!"
The maintainer should be immediately removed from his position and replaced with someone with good people skills. Ideally from an underrepresented demographic.
Funny how it's the small contributors that inevitably end up being the ones who have to set their ego aside and not the well known committers. Sounds very much like an old boys club.
Yeah, it's shocking that established contributors set the norms for the project.
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Anyways, he looks like a major drug addict
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Ariel was a man's name before The Little Mermaid came out in 1989
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