Circa 1996 I was getting my CS degree. At the same time, I got a job at a small local company running an ISP on the side. A dozen Hayes modems hooked up to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. And two PCs (named "hops" and "barley") running Slackware. That was my first experience with Linux. It was a barbaric OS compared to the Unix workstations we had in the CS department running HP/UX and SunOS. But it had promise...
I think my first open source contribution was while working there (I added the "-e" switch to chpasswd) and it's still part of Linux today. Let's see... found it:
Yes, absolutely. But it was solid Unix OS with excellent documentation. I also worked for the CS department. We installed software centrally to an NFS server which was then automounted. We used something called "depot" from CMU to setup a software depot:
The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you wanted "make install" to put software in one location (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths compiled in as if it were in a different location (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came with open source software then just weren't designed that way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things. I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the depot scheme.
Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now.
Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which was similarly painful but got easier over time.
I think my first open source contribution was while working there (I added the "-e" switch to chpasswd) and it's still part of Linux today. Let's see... found it:
https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/blob/master/NEWS#L178...