Notices by Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org), page 2
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Sunday, 22-Oct-2023 12:21:07 JST 
Jonathan Corbet
@adamw @bars @marcan Bug tracking is clearly a place where the kernel project falls down badly, agreed. We finally got regression tracking funded, but that's just barely the beginning of the problem.
For bug tracking, one aspect of the problem is a simple unwillingness on the part of many maintainers to bother with a bug tracker. That does not help at all.
The other part is something I'm going to poke people at the LF shindig about next week. Almost everybody who works on the kernel is paid to do it, but there are many areas that no company thinks it needs to worry about funding. Of the 5,000 developers who work on the kernel each year, not a single one of them is tasked with documentation — my own pet peeve. But (almost) nobody is paid to work on tools, and it hurts us in all kinds of ways, including bug tracking. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Sunday, 22-Oct-2023 12:20:56 JST
Jonathan Corbet
@marcan @bars One of the worst things about working in the kernel — one of the most toxic parts — is the constant stream of nastiness toward our community that comes from outside.
The kernel community is far from perfect; we have a lot of problems and we have been actively working for years (decades) to improve on them.
We are, nonetheless, a project that manages to incorporate nearly 100,000 commits per year, from over 5,000 developers, into a single code base while maintaining a level of quality that — while also certainly in need of improvement — is good enough for deployment into billions of devices.
As for the use of email...email is painful and broken, but we have found nothing better that will work at the scale we need. See https://lwn.net/Articles/702177/ from a few years back. For all its faults, email is distributed, non-proprietary, scriptable, and gives everybody the freedom to choose their tools; it is a highly inclusive solution in a way that proprietary web forges (for example) are not. Someday we'll find something better and move on with a cry of joy, but that day has not come.
Rather than crapping on the kernel community from afar, why not work with us to try to make things better? -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 01:35:54 JST
Jonathan Corbet
@liw @neil @pwaring Surprisingly, I have a *lot* of sympathy for people trying to earn their living with their writing. It's not an easy path, and you have to pick your poison... whether it's overt paywalls, annoying popups, or surveillance advertising, it's going to be annoying to people.
We've found a solution that works well enough for LWN - at least, well enough to keep us from having to get real jobs - but I'm not sure what the best solution is in a general sense.
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