Kernel is not a monolithic application, and you cannot develop it like one. There are tons of actors: independent developers, small support companies (like Collabora), corporations, all with different priorities. There is a large number of independent forks (e.g. for obscure devices), that will never be merged, but need to merge e.g. security patches from the mainline. A single project management tool won’t do, not your typical business grade tracking&reporting tool.
CI is already there. Not a central one—again, distributed across different organizations. Different organizations have different needs for CI, e.g. supporting weird architectures that they need to develop against.
There is a reason Torvalds created git—existing tools just wouldn’t work. There might be a place for a similar revolution regarding a bugtracker…
This plea for help is specifically for non-coding, but still deeply technical work.
The thread is an attempt to merge a new file system, bcachefs
. This is a large change, requiring a lot of review from experienced developers, and getting anyone to do this work turned out to be difficult. Darrick here started talking how, in general, all development of file systems in Linux is troubled by lack of manpower.
I guess the best start would be to have a person to organize volunteers.
Another idea that just occurred to me. Maybe position: absolute; both the real content and the gibberish content with the same top, left, width, and height attributes so that the real content and the gibberish overlap and occupy the same location on the page. Make sure both the real and gibberish content elements have no background so that remains clear. Put the gibberish content in the DOM before the real content. (I think that will ensure that the gibberish appears behind the real content even without setting the z-index.) And then make JS set the color of the text in the gibberish element the same color as the background so humans can’t see it.
Be aware that these techniques can affect accessibility for people using screen readers.
Last job, we started writing mixing bits of Kotlin in an otherwise mostly-Java in a monolithic Spring-based service. Good experience.
I found it crazy useful to study old, established, mature technologies, like relational databases, storage, low-level networking stack, optimizing compilers, etc. Much more valuable than learning the fad of the year. For example, consider studying internals of Postgresql if you’re using it.
I’m not a person who’d be loyal to a brand. Yet Motorola consistently produces devices that turn out to be the best trade-offs (price to functionality) for me. And, so far, all these devices were pretty durable as well, though it’s not that I really put smartphones into lots of use. That’s all I can say.
So far I’ve been following recommendations from this person: https://old.reddit.com/r/NewMaxx/comments/16xhbi5/ssd_guides_resources_ssd_help_post_your_questions/