Comment by nubinetwork

10 months ago

While I never submitted a patch personally, I had once conferred with some of the input devs to add a trackpad to the synaptics driver... they were queueing up an update to add other trackpads, and they said they would add mine... 5 years later, it's still not there. It was just a one-liner, and I'm not really sure why it never got added...

On the other hand, I once ran into an issue with uboot where a bad update knocked out my emmc, usb and sata controllers... found an email address of someone developing the dtb files and got in touch with them, and it was fixed in under a week.

At the end of the day, people are weird sometimes. I wish all the best for marcan.

27 comments

nubinetwork

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ogoffart  10 months ago

I tried once to contribute a fix to be able to use the track-pad on my laptop many years ago. But it was not accepted as the maintainer claimed it was an problem in userspace that did not process out of order events correctly. Despite none of the other drivers sent the events out of order. I had no intention to fix the problem on X11 (the only userspace for this at the time), so I used the patched kernel driver locally until I stopped using that laptop. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43591 https://lore.kernel.org/all/1340829375-4995-1-git-send-email...

bsimpson  10 months ago

FWIW, I have submitted a couple small patches to get the display and gamepad for my Lenovo Legion Go recognized correctly - probably similar levels of complexity to your change. One was to input and one was to display quirks.

They did take months to finally land, and the whole process of getting my corp email address to be compatible with their email-based PR system was way more of a faff than it had any right to be, but they did land. You can install mainline Linux on a Legion Go now and the display and controller will behave as expected, out-of-the-box.

naasking  10 months ago

> 5 years later, it's still not there. It was just a one-liner, and I'm not really sure why it never got added.

I think they expect people who want things to advocate harder than just mentioning it once. If no one brings it up again, then they assume that no one cares.

  • mid-kid  10 months ago

    why bother infering such intent when the obvious answer - that they simply forgot about it with no ill intentions - is right there?

    • naasking  10 months ago

      Requiring people to advocate for their changes is not ill-intent. It handles all cases such as forgetting/missing a patch, and disagreement whether something is needed. The point is there's no system in place to track which patches "should ideally be included but weren't for some reason", it's up for the people who need them to push for them.

arp242  10 months ago

People forget things etc.

Should probably have just asked again, or sent a small one-line patch. It's "mention something on Slack" vs "creating a GitHub issue/PR"

  • lazyasciiart  10 months ago

    Then you get stories like Greg in the linked mail thread, who emailed to check after not hearing anything and got told that now he'd been annoying and it would never be done.

    • account42  10 months ago

      A story about a 17000 line patch with seemingly no discussion before dumping it on the kernel maintainers. Understandable that noone felt like reviewing it.

  • samus  10 months ago

    Which sounds inefficient and exactly the sort of problem that doesn't happen with a Github issue/PR.