On Tue, 22 Aug 2017 12:48:42 -0400, Cindy-Sue Causey said:
An observation that may just mean I haven't stumbled upon it yet is that it would be nice to... stumble upon... a list of kernel problems that *kernelnewbies* could cut their teeth on. I do understand that this is a naive wish list item due to the nearly every nanosecond changing complexity of things. :)
Such a thing existed 10 or 15 years ago. Unfortunately for the newbies, there are very few problems that newbies can attack, because if they were that simple, somebody would already have *done* them. One thing in particular that pretty much killed the kernel-janitors project (which did cleanup of code) was a change in the rules for kernel API changes. Before, somebody could add a new/changed API, and the janitors would change all the uses in the tree. We now require that a patch series that changes an API has to also fix all in-tree uses of the API.