Sign extension bugs are the worst. Silent for ages then suddenly everything is on fire. Spent a lot of time in C doing low-level firmware work and ran into the same class of issue more than once. Nice writeup, congrats on the patch.
Agreed. The level of aggressive gatekeepers is just crazy, take Linux ARM mailing list for example. I found the Central and Eastern Europeans particularly aggressive there and I'm saying this as on myself. They sure do like to feel special there, with very little soft skills.
Sign extension bugs are the worst. Silent for ages then suddenly everything is on fire. Spent a lot of time in C doing low-level firmware work and ran into the same class of issue more than once. Nice writeup, congrats on the patch.
The first one always takes way longer than the code itself deserves. Most of the work is figuring out the unwritten rules, not writing the patch.
This is a big problem in open source that seems taboo to discuss.
In my opinion, unwritten rules are for gatekeeping. And if a new person follows all the unwritten rules, magically there's no one willing to review.
I think this is how large BFDL-style open source projects slowly become less and less relevant over the next few decades.
Agreed. The level of aggressive gatekeepers is just crazy, take Linux ARM mailing list for example. I found the Central and Eastern Europeans particularly aggressive there and I'm saying this as on myself. They sure do like to feel special there, with very little soft skills.
Can confirm that it also happens in other complex systems! Still a lot of good time and the novelty factor helps with pushing through
Sand that after so many years these rules are still not written down.
Well done and great writeup! Any idea why the bug hadn’t shown up sooner, like when running self tests?
Congrats and happy for you, you had a lot of fun and did something genuinely interesting
I love these kind of posts.