Troubles with triaging syzbot reports [LWN.net]

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 13:39 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Troubles with triaging syzbot reports by NYKevin
Parent article: Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

> As a Google engineer (who has nothing to do with syzbot or syzkaller), I tend to suspect this is exacerbated by a cultural difference. At Google, frequent context switching between the browser, the MUA (which is just Gmail, so a tab in the browser), the console, etc., is considered entirely normal and unremarkable. You have to switch between them frequently, or else you'll never get anything done. Meanwhile, on LKML, this is considered horrifying and grossly inefficient (at least by some people, anyway).

But you're imposing your workflow on other people ...

I make no judgement as to whether the tools are "good" or "bad" - different people have different definitions, and personally I'd dump both the browser and gmail in the "bad" category, but just because you are quite happy with your tools, doesn't mean that other people can function efficiently with them.

For grey-beards, it's likely that the console and MUA are the same tool (emacs).

I have to work with gmail, slack, and Excel/VBA. When I'm doing "real work" it's almost invariably in Excel's VBA window, and even the context switch to Excel proper is a productivity-damaging one. gmail and slack pretty much get ignored.

I don't think it really matters what your tools are, what matters is that (if possible) you are working with a favourite tool, and that you can minimise the number of times you switch between tools.

And another thing the young bucks don't realise, is that the reason greybeards stick to their favourite tools is that OLDER PEOPLE DON'T LEARN SO FAST. As a greybeard myself, I don't give a monkeys what tools other people prefer (so long as it doesn't impact on me), but I can do the job with MY tools of choice in a fraction of the time it would take if *I* used *SOMEONE*ELSE'S* tools of choice. I like to think I could do it faster than them with their choice, but that's arrogance :-)

(And all the evidence says that people "who can multi-task" are actually much less productive than people who can sit and concentrate without interruption. Case in point, we had something kick off at work yesterday morning, by yesterday evening I had digested the problem, worked out a fix, and rolled it out for testing. My bosses were shocked how fast it was done. But I was allowed to *concentrate*!)

Cheers,
Wol

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Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 17:58 UTC (Thu) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] (4 responses)

Maybe, but I don't think you can take this (the right to not demand everybody adapt to your way of working) arbitrarily far. For example, I remember well the golden times when all email was plaintext, but at the point where you are one in a million wanting that because html mail disrupts your workflow, then I'd say it's already your problem, and if you cannot perform properly because of your choices, then it's you who needs to adapt or at least find a workaround.

That's not to say that I, too, wouldn't find the problem complained of here very real and the response completely impossible to understand or accept

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 19:14 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (2 responses)

You do realize that anyone e.g. sending patches in HTML mail gets told to resend, don't you? With pointer to Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst or Documentation/process/email-clients.rst if whoever responds feels like being helpful. Which, I might add, contains the following bit:
-----------------------------------
Gmail (Web GUI)
***************

Does not work for sending patches.

Gmail web client converts tabs to spaces automatically.

At the same time it wraps lines every 78 chars with CRLF style line breaks
although tab2space problem can be solved with external editor.

Another problem is that Gmail will base64-encode any message that has a
non-ASCII character. That includes things like European names.
-----------------------------------

Might or might not be accurate these days, but that pretty much means "non-starter for kernel development, use their IMAP interface with a real MUA if you are forced to use a gmail account". Has nothing to do with the age, etc. - see the mentioned files for the real reasons. If gmail web client has solved these problems nowadays, a patch to Documentation/process/email-clients.rst along the lines of "here's how to set it up so it would do the right thing" would be welcome...

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 21:33 UTC (Thu) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, this happens in the kernel development context, and I'm not saying there's not a good reason for it (although I'm not saying the opposite either!).

Look, I'm no fan of all the new ways of doing things either. Rather, I just want to point that "it disrupts my/our way of working" only goes so far. It goes a lot more far, of course, in communities where lots of people want to do it like that (or there's people with sufficient power to just say this is how we do it), but even that has its limits...

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 16, 2022 4:27 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> Rather, I just want to point that "it disrupts my/our way of working" only goes so far.

True. But when "you" are asking "me" to respond to your bug report, "you" need to make that worth my while. So either a REALLY important bug, or a report that is REALLY easy to work with (or lots of dollars).

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 23:25 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

My email client does this to HTML email: https://github.com/linuxrocks123/MailTask/blob/bb6bfb8828...

It uses Aaron Swartz's html2text library to convert it to plaintext. It actually works pretty well.