Patch submitted to the Linux kernel by a 4 year old.

Ken27238@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 788 points –
nixCraft 🐧 (@nixCraft@mastodon.social)
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...Kernel patch at age 4. Sigh... What have I done with my life?

You done fucked up from the moment you turned 5. That's where you went wrong. You should have just stopped getting older

she's going to one of those mythical 20 yo with 15 years of experience 😉

You can start now!


I am no developer, but I've submitted my first patch a few months ago.

It simply added my laptop to a list of quirks, in order to make the microphone work.

Breaking News at msn.com: "Linux uses child labour!"

No matter how many times I read this I have no idea what's going on. Can someone explain this like I'm 3

A girl read documentation and see that all the titles are underlined with -, but one of the letter isn't underlined like the others (that's the lonely s). Then she asks the person doing the commit to fix it and they fix it together.

And then the older pair programmer goes to social media and calls out their partners age for clout. Ageism is real in tech. :)

Wow we really can’t just appreciate a wholesome/cute moment?

They’re telling a joke.

I didn’t see how it’s funny.

Because it’s an absurd statement, as in completely obviously not an example of ageism in tech.

Inevitably, there will be times in one's life when another's attempt at humor fails to amuse. When striken by such terrible tragedy, take heart, for you have the knowledge that it's just your opinion, bro.

I would have said "you could be a Linux maintainer," but given this post, clearly Linux maintainers are less dense than you.

Wow, people didn't get your joke. What the hell...

I wonder how many 4 year olds are using Lemmy... Ah sorry, there's the ageism again :<

So in the documentation they had

1.9 Ext4 file system parameters
------------------------------

As you can see the 's' doesn't get a '-' under it. So they changed the documentation to:

1.9 Ext4 file system parameters
-------------------------------

so the 's' in parameters gets a dash under it.

this seems to be the standard as everywhere else the dashes go for the same length of characters as the above line. Example:

2.0 /proc/consoles
------------------

The little girl said the 's' in parameters is sad because it didn't get the dash under it and it was all alone. So they added the dash.

See the first red box in the documentation text? The underline dashes don't go up to the last letter (s).

4 year old girl said the "s" was sad because of that, uncle submitted a patch to fix that, and it was accepted.

No no the uncle submitted the patch. The girl did. He helped her though.

So, is it her gmail account, while the minimum age for registration is 13 years? And why does she write about herself in the singular 3rd person?

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The line of code (well, documentation in the code) used to look like something like this (I'm not sure if this formatting will work on mobile, sorry):

The code ends with an s

----------------------

And after her changes it looks like this:

The code ends with an s

------------------------

See how I added an extra - in that second line? That makes the S happier because now it also has a - below it like all the other letters. This also just generally makes that line more consistent with other spots in the code. So it's not a bad change. It doesn't do anything really but making your code format nice, easy to read, and consistent is usually important in programming so although it doesn't do anything tangible it's still a valuable change!

She spotted that there was a missing - in the underline for a heading in a piece of documentation, and her parent helped her submit a fix.

The first red box shows that the dotted line underneith the text doesn't go all the way to the s in the text above. In the other red box, the dotted line goes all the way.

The neice submitted a patch to add the missing line.

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lazy to not submit a unit test to check for this throughout the repo. That girl isn't going anywhere with that kind of work ethic

Sphinx has warnings for these already. They're just suppressed and ignored :)

Can a 4-yr old legally consent to the copyright assignment?

Which copyright assignment?

A bunch of = aren't copyrightable but even if they were, the child would retain the copyright.

Though slightly cliche, this just feels right. That niece has learned a great lesson about how collaborating to improve things is always possible, and that open-source relies on everyone doing their bit.

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I would like to request a patch to the patch request. The submitter describes the dashes as equal signs and it's really bugging me.

Ah, yes, totally not written by one of her parents. I hate this kind of crap. She noticed that it wasn't underlined, and they did the rest. Why is this news? No 4-yo. spells "tragedy".

"Look how special my kid is, everyone!!"

I would normally be inclined to agree but this isn't one of those "omg I just had the most intelligent conversation with my 4-yo today".

It's clearly someone sharing their hobby/job with their niece, and what better way to do that than by including them in a practical aspect. It also literally says they "helped her as she's 4 years old".

You commenting is only bringing more attention to the post by increasing the comment count so maybe reevaluate your approach in the future if you're so against wholesome content.

Agreed. Sorry. I often hear this kind of stuff IRL from my relatives, so I might be prejudiced.

People bragging about their kids is irritating. However, I hope the girl ends up being a Linux guru :-)