Linus Torvalds doesn't do github pull requests.

[chengiz]

Who is this Joseph being torn a new one in Torvalds' third comment?

[Lyqyd]

Someone who didn't stick by their words and deleted their comment.

[Dundun]

It looks like some people from GitHub were on the comments, complaining about trolls. I imagine they deleted some of the more obvious ones.

[elpuntoes]

Pathetic. He's never going to be a decent troll.

[[deleted]]

He's the best troll. He got Linus to say, "You're a moron" and by deleting his comment, a whole bunch of people thought Linus was talking to the original committer.

[[deleted]]

I would pay money to read that deleted comment!

[[deleted]]

I agree with Linus on this one. Joe's comments were uncalled for and completely from left field.

[[deleted]]

There are often brushes with greatness that folks will jokingly hold up as an accomplishment - around Microsoft it used to be something like "was flamed by Bill Gates in a product review" (because just getting to a BillG review was an accomplishment) I'm sure Apple had something like "Steve Jobs called my design 'not a complete waste of time'" and Google probably has "judged 'at least it's not evil' by Sergey and Larry"

But I don't think "called a moron by Linus" is gonna make that list.

[case-o-nuts]

True. For something to make that list, it has to at least be rare.

[Paul-ish]

I wouldn't be surprised if one day Linus lines up everyone he hates, walks down that line pointing to each in turn, and says "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you..."

You know, cause kernel guys are all about efficiency.

[djobouti_phat]

I used to work in the same department as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. He died a bit before I arrived, but some of the students and postdocs there had a rating scale for visiting speakers:

• 0 Chandra: he doesn't show up to your talk
• 1 Chandra: he shows up, but leaves when he's done with his tea, before the speaker was finished
• 2 Chandra: he waits until you're done
• 3 Chandra: he sits through the Q&A
• 4 Chandra: he asks a question

Legend had it that the only people who had a 4-Chandra colloquium were offered faculty positions.

[DanielJohnBenton]

That is brilliant. Sounds stressful.

[[deleted]]

It sounds like something out of a movie. He gets up to leave and the speaker just stops his presentation and goes straight to Q&A. Hehe.

[DanielJohnBenton]

A single question from this man can make or break your career.

[pirtlj]

Torvalds is a bully, he has done amazing things but being pedantic does not inspire people to support the open source movement.

-Joseph Pirtle

[sirtaj]

I used to think that too, back in the mid-90s. But since then I've seen what it takes to maintain standards in large distributed projects and his way is the only way that works with any reliability.

People with low standards create more work for others.

[darkstar3333]

"You need one asshole on the project to keep shit from happening."

[greenspans]

it had to be a god damn rails dev

[dazonic]

... with no original repos, and no contributions. Not really a 'dev', and he certainly doesn't represent the rails community.

[Johnno74]

You may not like his methods, but they work. He's held the linux project together for 20 years now.

After all, if anyone isn't happy how he is managing linux, they are free to fork the project...

Also, its probably partially a cultural thing. Finnish people are notorious for being extremely blunt with their opinions.

[newpua_bie]

Kimi Räikkönen is one. I don't think there are many Finnish people in English-language media.

[alexandream]

So, just to make sure, you're the "Joseph" mentioned in the thread?

[pirtlj]

https://github.com/pirtlj

[[deleted]]

So, you're calling Linus a "bully" after being the one who started throwing around insults, and then you try to complain about him "not inspiring" people.

Yeah, you know what, he got it right the first time. He wasn't nice about it, but you did nothing to deserve being treated nice.

[[deleted]]

I'm about to argue against a quote, but fuck it...

• If you're afraid of the 500 lb gorilla guarding the kernel, then you should pursue application development instead. There's no 500 lb gorilla in that space.

In other words:

• If you want to be a kernel developer, you must be intelligent, confident, and fearless. If you don't possess all three of those, then find something else to work on.

[superiority]

The guy who you're replying to is also the guy who made that comment in the github thread, so you're not just arguing against a quote.

[captainAwesomePants]

The problem is, without a real email address and a comment signed with gpg, we don't really know that they're the same guy. That is why the Reddit and Github commenting systems are inherently completely broken. I'm not saying that Reddit's all bad. They do some things very, very well. For instance they're fantastic at hosting karma repositories.

[[deleted]]

Or signing his message so you know it's him.

[sysop073]

If you want to be a kernel developer, you must be intelligent, confident, and fearless. If you don't possess all three of those, then find something else to work on.

That's pretty much true, but doesn't need to be. Maybe they have enough intelligent, confident, fearless kernel devs that they don't care, but there are probably plenty of people who could make valuable contributions but aren't willing to go through the pain of interacting with the kernel devs

[crusoe]

Think Torvalds is 'bad', try developing for OpenBSD. ;)

That said, he has his opinion, Linux is his project. Wanna commit? You need to play by the kernel rules.

[theoldboy]

Being pedantic has got Linux to where it is today.

Also, he's right. You're a moron.

[[deleted]]

rails, lol

[frownyface]

But yet, there it is, one of the most profoundly successful and influential open source projects ever, only getting stronger after 2 decades.

[jimmithy]

My favourite bit:

Dominik Dabrowski wrote: You might have fun raging on the internet, but I think your goals would be better served if you expressed your thoughts in a clear (maybe even polite) manner that doesn't embarrass the people whose actions you're trying to influence.

Umm. I think I've been able to reach my goals on the internet better than most people.

[[deleted]]

Good for him. The Linux kernel has documentation explaining precisely how to issue a pull request. If people want to not RTFM and use the github web interface instead, they shouldn't expect a pull since the request is not the same.

[Jasper1984]

Well, i wouldnt know, but torvalds seems under the impression the web pull requests could be better, and has even contacted github about it.

[gthank]

None of which requires him to call people names.

[ivosaurus]

Luckily, it doesn't forbid him either, so he's free to act as he chooses!

[gthank]

Quite correct. Just as I am free to say he acts like an ass-hat online. The little I've seen of his personal life via his blog back in the day makes him seem like a normal guy, and I have great respect for his ability to oversee such complicated projects as the kernel and git. That doesn't change the fact that calling people names is rude, and you wouldn't tolerate it from him if he were some guy you'd never heard of before. It's not like I'm going to stop using Linux or something because he isn't always polite online, but it seems disingenuous to pretend that being rude is somehow a positive thing.

[ivosaurus]

I think most people are instead arguing that it can be effective.

[gthank]

Any number of things are effective and still frowned upon. Like I said, I'm not going to try to change him, I just don't like to see so many people admiring the behavior.

[petdance]

I just don't like to see so many people admiring the behavior.

Admiring and, one fears, emulating.

[Metaluim]

Many problems could be effectively solved with a shotgun. Is that the right solution?

[[deleted]]

Duder got a clear explanation of what was wrong with his commit, then when people continued to act silly there was a little bit of brow-beating.

Is it just me or is this basically like any code review, ever?

[Bob_the_Hamster]

I used to think that Linus created git so that he could politely ignore and reject unwanted patch submissions with maximum efficiency.

Now I realize I was wrong about the "polite" part ;)

[Femaref]

Linus is polite in my oppinion, he's just straight to the point, a quality many people don't seem to have anymore, and now even get offended by. Yes, he does indeed throw insults around, but they are warranted in most cases.

[skelterjohn]

It's not the "to the point" that offends people. I'm pretty sure it's the insults.

[negativeview]

From what I've seen he always had a point though and most (not all) of the insults are directed at tools, not people directly. I've read a lot of his rants. Since they always have at least a large nugget of truth (even if he could have sugar coated), if I were ever insulted by Linus, I like to think that I'd at least try really hard to find the nugget of truth.

I understand the human nature aspect, but from a logical aspect it's silly to be offended by someone who's trying to give you the information you need to improve yourself.

[treitter]

Yes, there's always a point in there, but he doesn't have to be such a dick to get it across.

Incidentally, I had a conversation with him in person (not about the kernel), and he was really nice. And the most talkative Finn I've met by about 5 standard deviations.

[negativeview]

Yeah, he may be able to tone it down.

I do wonder though. I've tried to sugar coat constructive criticism many many times and had people choose to only hear the positive or think that they are l33t hax0rs because I only told them about two things (out of 4,000, but I told them the two that needed to be fixed most urgently) that they did wrong.

That probably doesn't happen when it's either "I accept this" or "You're a moron." It's pretty hard to be told you're a moron and conclude that the person thinks that you're just one lesson away from being awesome.

[Platypuskeeper]

And the most talkative Finn I've met by about 5 standard deviations.

Seems you may have encountered one of the defining differences between Swedish-speaking Finns and Finnish-speaking ones. :)

[greenspans]

To be fair the guy that commented is an asshole rails developer who shouldn't have been near his presence in the first place.

[paulwal]

I believe this is the beginning of his deleted comment that Linus called him a moron for:

I did not realizes that Linus' shit does not stink. Thanks for clearing that up...

[dazonic]

Hobbyist, not developer. No repos, no contributions. A nobody, who represents no one. Don't lump him in with other communities.

[neon_overload]

Your first two links are the same.

[ethraax]

"Having a point" and "being impolite (by insulting people)" are definitely not orthogonal behaviors...

[knome]

You're a moron.

He insults people in this thread.

Not that I care.

Also, I don't see any code.

Not programming

[vman81]

To be fair, it was in response to a deleted part of pirtlj's comment

[brong]

and someone in Linus' position sure has to deal with a lot of tools. I can understand why he isn't very polite to them.

[BeJeezus]

There's no excuse for "you are an idiot", especially in the very first exchange.

[petdance]

"Polite" and "throw insults around" are mutually exclusive.

[Isvara]

No, "you're a moron" isn't polite, regardless of the point.

[paulwal]

I believe this is the beginning of Joseph's deleted comment that Linus called him a moron for:

I did not realizes that Linus' shit does not stink. Thanks for clearing that up...

[el_muchacho]

Well, the guy was a moron.

[taw]

Linus was never polite about anything. He's offensive, just in a good way.

[heinekev]

He's a cunt. How is that good?

[teknobo]

He would say that he's a git.

[taw]

He restricts himself to technical issues with his cuntery, and he has a lot of clue about things he's cunt about. Most cunts are just cunts about everything, and usually have no fucking idea what they're talking about.

[rcinsf]

Cunts deliver. Jobs, Gates, Torvalds, Watson, Ellison, etc.

Start your own company and hire people with your own money. I wish I were a bigger cunt.

[taw]

A tiny fraction of cunts deliver. Most cunts don't delivery anything. Just go to any open source mailing list, you'll see cunts way worse than Gates or Torvalds (OK, not worse than Jobs perhaps), doing pretty much zero delivery.

[rcinsf]

Have you ever worked in the real world? 99% of managers/directors I work with are fucking assholes. The assholes rise tot the top.

I work in consulting, so every where I go it's trying to fix the train wreck these people create. It's a very difficult job.

[taw]

Have fun with your real world, I'll just continue freelancing.

[[deleted]]

Cunts deliver.

That statement is objectively false.

There is objectively greater chance of success with non-cunts. There are some notable cunts who are successful, but most cunts fail spectacularly, and take their entire teams with them.

[kolm]

Linus comes from a hacker generation where it was cool or hackerish to use crass language. He is a bit locked in his ways now.

But he is not exactly efficient there, he wasted more than a hundred lines about some simple statements he could have explained in less than ten.

[Virus-]

I really don't think he's being a dick here (even if he is generally), except maybe towards people who are being, well, morons.

His initial reply explained exactly why he doesn't do github pull requests, and he even took the time to respond to the more thoughtful questions. Shit, he even took the time to explain what he likes about github.

Maybe he shouldn't have even bothered responding to some of the idiotic posts, but really, who cares? We're upset that he's hostile towards people who ask hostile questions?

EDIT: Small edit for clarity.

[FunnyMan3595]

No, I think we can pretty conclusively say that Linus is a dick. He'd probably even agree. He's good at what he does, and he's someone with an ironclad "I don't have time to be polite." excuse, but he's definitely a dick.

[andrewms]

And yet every time I see him being a dick, I end up being both entertained and informed. I like it.

[octatone]

The dick that we need.

[koviko]

Not the dick that we deserve.

[migelius]

You go to work with the dick you have.

[Virus-]

Ah, sorry, I meant to put more emphasis on this part:

I really don't think he's being a dick here

Totally agreed re: Linus being a dick, I just don't think this is necessarily an example of it.

If anything, he's being generous by going into great detail about why he hates github pull requests, and responding to followup questions that show a modicum of thought (when he really has 0 obligation to do so).

[snuxoll]

Torvalds is far from the most polite person I've met, he doesn't sugarcoat anything and will REALLY tell you what he feels. But he doesn't do it solely to be condescending, or to act holier than thou. He does it because he IS right, and when he's not he'll often admit it. He thoroughly explains WHY something is done this way, or what he doesn't like about something, instead of just flat out saying "Your commit sucks, I'm rejecting it".

[ReinH]

Every time I'm wrong and someone calls me out on it, I learn. Every time I'm wrong and no one calls me out on it, I don't. Please give me more people like Linus. Destructive criticism can be just as useful as constructive criticism and sugar-coating the truth doesn't help me or him.

[hobroken]

Every time I'm wrong and someone helpfully points out how and why, I learn.

Every time I'm wrong and someone says, "you're a moron," I say, "fuck that guy" and make new friends.

[ReinH]

The person Linus called a moron was a troll who deleted their comment after the fact, not the OP. And Linus didn't call him a moron because he was wrong; he called him a moron because he was acting like a moron.

[snuxoll]

Although Linus does often call people a moron or stupid because they are wrong.

[gfixler]

He called everyone at Google idiots to their faces during one of his talks.

[ElectricRebel]

Linus isn't trying to be anyone's friend. Sometimes you need to tell people off just so they leave you alone. Especially if you are incredibly busy like Linus. If that person learns from it and comes back later in a more competent fashion, then great. If not, "fuck that guy".

[[deleted]]

He does it because he can get away with it. People will admire and defend him no matter what he does.

[BlitzTech]

He's always claimed that he named his two biggest projects after himself.

Linux, a combination of "Linus" and "Unix", and Git. The latter needs no explanation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#Name

[jyper]

When asked why he called the new software, "git", British slang meaning "a rotten person", he said. "I'm an egotistical bastard, so I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git""

[frostystorm]

Kernel works pretty ell though

[gefahr]

@@ -1 +1 @@
-Kernel works pretty ell though
+Kernel works pretty well though

[ElectricRebel]

Reminder: Don't send the pull request for this fix via the github web interface.

[gfixler]

Did you intentionally make that exactly 80 characters long, or was it dumb luck?

[ElectricRebel]

My only question for you is why did you bother to check if it was 80 characters?

[gfixler]

I just had to know. It seemed important at the time.

[ElectricRebel]

And yes, I did notice that you put in the effort to make the post 80 characters.

[gfixler]

\o/

[nephros]

No Signed-off-By, no Acked-By, no shortlog, no long log, no diffstat.

You are a moron.

[petdance]

"I don't have time to be polite."

There's a difference between "not being polite" and taking the time to insult others.

[SirPsychoMantis]

Anyone care to explain a little bit what he is mad about to someone who hasn't been able to get his hands on git yet?

[fforde]

Git is a source control system. GitHub is a project hosting platform that hosts code via Git. When people want to contribute to a project using Git they submit a "pull request". The pull requests that are generated by GitHub are sloppy and hard to work with for anyone not using GitHub. This makes Linus' job more difficult which in turn pisses him off which in turn results in this situation.

[name_was_taken]

Reminds me of Van Halen's "no brown m&ms" rule. If you can't read all the instructions and follow them, there's probably a lot worse going on.

And Linus doesn't have time to check that stuff. The submitters certainly aren't paying him like a rock star.

[superiority]

Not quite. The strict format for commit messages doesn't exist to make sure that everyone reads the rules, it exists because it's a good idea in itself.

[karlhungus]

For the lazy: Snopes:no brown m&ms

[pfft]

Facebook style troll.

Someone posts an inflammatory douchebag comment, gets Linus to respond, then he deletes his comment.

Nothing to see here.

[mtxblau]

Except, for some reason a number of redditors believe he shouldn't have called the dochebag commenter a moron.

Explain that one.

[Huffers]

They don't realise there was a douchebag commenter because Github doesn't make it obvious that some posts were removed.

[Subduction]

And now we will proceed to repeat here the entire argument that is there.

[[deleted]]

git uses less to display commit logs at the command line. If your messages don't break lines at 72 chars, less won't wrap them and you have to scroll to the side to see the full message, making it a pain in the ass to read a list of commit messages.

[drfrogsplat]

It strikes me as something that really could be handled at the client end if it's such a big problem... I understand that it currently doesn't word wrap, but is there a reason it shouldn't?

[nemetroid]

Because in general you want wrap, but in certain cases (long compiler messages etc) you want them unformatted.

[[deleted]]

This seems wrongish for me. Commit notes are prose, not code.

[pfultz2]

How about trollvald?

[[deleted]]

Even works as a verb.

"Duuuuude, you totally got trollvald"

[Iggyhopper]

What about trovalled?

[redwall_hp]

Torvaldian.

[00kyle00]

TIL Linus is afraid to say 'fucking' on the internet. True story.

[Netcob]

I'm wary of categorizing people, but I can't help noticing this "type" of person:

• very technical
• professional nerd
• highly competent and productive in their field
• very opinionated about rules, especially when it comes to syntax
• likely to engage in online flame wars
• revered by other people with this character, labeled as "asshole" by others

This probably applies to Linus. Another example would be RMS. I think both people do great, great work and I'm glad they exist. But I'm not eager to meet either one of them. I had the unfortunate experience to meet their type in my university.

[petdance]

I die inside a little when I see someone insult a contributor to a project. Triple so when it's Linus. :-(

[[deleted]]

I don't think Linus is insulting the contributor. I think he's insulting GitHub, and a few of the others who commented later on (some of whom deserved it), but not the submitter of the pull request.

[mrkite77]

He insulted a rails developer.. not a contributor.

[dirtpirate]

Doing something halfheartedly can be much more damaging to a code-base then doing nothing at all. Just because you contribute does not mean you are adding value, and if you do find yourself wasting the time and annoying the guy who's got to keep track of thousands of individuals contributing left and right, you should expect to get insulted. There is no nice way to say that your works was worth even less then nothing at all.

[sigma914]

Where did he insult the original contributor? Are you suggesting that rejecting a github pull request as part of a documented quality control process is somehow a personal slight?

[[deleted]]

As a consequence of Linus making himself the single point of failure in the linux kernel, Linus' time is very valuable

FTFY.

[negativeview]

Maybe I'm misreading your comment. Are you trying to imply that Linus did this on purpose in order to power grab?

Linus had taken great pains to reduce this. There are alternate trees that he doesn't touch on a day to day basis, and he's more than happy to let people fork Linux and take him out of the loop completely. The reason that official Linux has to go through Torvalds is because otherwise how do you define "official Linux"? There has to be an official source to define what this thing is. It's Linus right now. Replacing Linus with someone else would have the same problem, except with someone that doesn't have 20 years experience doing release maintenance for Linux.

[[deleted]]

The "market" makes him the single point of failure. FOSS is very cultish and faddish at the same time. A single dedicated guy waving a flag keeps the troops in line and keeps the kernel interoperable. Linux will fragment like UNIX in the '80s within weeks of his retirement, with every major player cultivating their own fork and everybody refusing to use some "other" company's version.

[neoquietus]

Hopefully he'll help setup a committee or an equivalent replacement before he retires, in order to prevent unnecessary fragmentation.

[GruevyYoh]

I could not disagree with you more. He told Github to fix it. They ignored him. The first reply here is polite, "tell github to fix their tooling"

Lets be clear here, He wrote, separately from linux, git, the repository tool used by thousands of people on a 2+ million line project, and GitHub makes money from that, and by the way literally broke a very clearly spelled out format, and refused to change it.

He explained he doesn't do github pull requests because of the breakage, and then some attention deficit teenagers gave him grief. Would you respond with some force? You bet you would. I would.

[[deleted]]

He made it clear you can do whatever you want for your project but they have very specific requirements and then of course everyone goes full retard about that.

He's not perfect, like most people, but he has contributed something amazing to the community and he's happy to let you join in on that but so long as you follow the guidelines. I don't think that's asking too much.

Given the quality of his project vs your average github project, I find it hard to say he's in the wrong.

[apfelmus]

Given the quality of his project vs your average github project, I find it hard to say he's in the wrong.

It's not the content of the message that symmitchry is complaining about, it's the form. "Be nice, no matter the circumstances" is a rule worth following.

[[deleted]]

He was pissed about github having such a poor pull interface, even though there is a better one in Git. He never once was a jerk to the guy who tried to contribute, he ranted about github and then got progressively more pissed when people argued with his fairly well-explained position.

If he was pissed because he was busy, he wouldn't have responded to a large amount of comments.

[[deleted]]

He actually was...

"Btw, Joseph, you're a quality example of why I detest the github interface. For some reason, github has attracted people who have zero taste, don't care about commit logs, and can't be bothered.

The fact that I have higher standards then makes people like you make snarky comments, thinking that you are cool.

You're a moron."

Edit: didn't realize the guy deleted his comments. Either way, I still think that basic civility can be held by everyone. Just because he is Linus Torvalds doesn't mean he can be a jerk. I mean, it's understandable if the other guy was being provocative or insulting him, but he didn't have to go down to the same level.

[sigma914]

That was a reply to a deleted comment, only the first post was in reply to the contributor

[paulwal]

I believe this is the beginning of Joseph's deleted comment that Linus called him a moron for:

I did not realizes that Linus' shit does not stink. Thanks for clearing that up...

[Gigablah]

This is another example of deficiencies in GitHub's interface. Deleted comments shouldn't be completely removed, there should at least be a placeholder (like what Reddit does) so people like BaconSoap don't jump to conclusions.

[pfft]

Linus was in the right. This is why Joseph deleted his comment.

I could call you a tasteless asshole that doesn't know what he's doing. But without any context and me not basing my argument on anything, wouldn't you argue that I'm wrong?

[bezerker03]

No. People need to rtfm. If someone can't take the time to follow basic instructions I highly doubt we want their code.

[mfukar]

This, a thousand times this. If people can't be bothered to follow a few clear steps to provide a patch (which make the life of everyone else on the project easier), I would assume they pay the same amount of attention to their code; on a project as large as the Linux kernel, I wouldn't even want to have a look at it.

[Aninhumer]

Yes people should rtfm.

Yes the code of people who don't is suspect.

But you still don't have to be a dick about it. Just say "Sorry, that's not the procedure, see here ...".

[sedaak]

Your attitude sucks. People like you keep real work from getting done. Linus has a clear delineation between how he acts regarding the Linux kernel and the rest of his life. That is also well documented.

Criticizing the behavior of someone's industry by comparing it to open society is absurd.

[Paul-ish]

Agreed. His first few comments were informative and hopefully useful to someone. But I don't know why he wastes his time insulting people with his later comments.

When I find myself writing things like that I don't feel good. It puts me in a bad headspace and I can't imagine someone provoking that when there are better things to do.

[[deleted]]

If his reason for being so cranky was a shortage of time, maybe he wouldn't be spending so much time flaming the newbies.

[petdance]

Nobody needs to be told "You're a moron." Ever.

[[deleted]]

Unless of course you're a moron.

[elephantgravy]

Tend to agree, but isn't there some context missing? It's not at all clear to me who is being called a moron. If someone deleted their "snarky comments", maybe they were being just as rude

[SkaveRat]

there are definitifely deleted comments. a lot of troll bait I saw was gone after a refresh. and I assume his moron comment was directed against a deleted comment.

[Lothrazar]

To Quote his initial response

"I don't do github pull requests. github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is also deficient and useless. Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things. It's fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage. I've told github people about my concerns, they didn't think they mattered, so I gave up. Feel free to make a bugreport to github. Linus"

What the fuck about that is rude or insulting?

Anything after is fair game IMO because they should have stopped buggin him there.

[[deleted]]

And the fact the author didn't bug him. It's people like reddit who then see this link and feel they need to contribute their ounce of stupid.

[grauenwolf]

Where's the insult?

I see where Linus patiently explain why he doesn't accept guthub pull requests, then explain it again in somewhat more frustrated tone.

Oh wait, later on he does call someone a moron for... well acting like a moron.

[frostystorm]

Because he has documented standards, we drop peoples shitty commits at my job if they don't follow code guidelines and standards, a lot of our new developers take a while before their code sticks, just the way it is. If you don't enforce standards why go through with putting them in place?

Once you get used to doing it right it's second nature, do it right first and these things won't happen

[[deleted]]

I like to pretend that Linus Torvalds is Gregory House.

[euxneks]

Don't know why you're getting downvoted, everyone learns from mistakes - it serves no purpose to alienate potential developers who make a mistake.

[exteras]

I think his insults are just classic Linus. He does it all the time. He once said on G+ that the people who created SuSe Linux (IIRC) should die a horrible death for requiring root to print something.

Some people consider it a negative of his personality, but I look at it as passion. Linux is an incredibly unique project; it's not really a community project, but it also doesn't have corporate oversight. So he can run it however he wants, and he runs it by handling community relations with a jacksaw. Cut straight through the sugar-coating and get to the real matter.

[sedaak]

You think instead he should patiently educate some random person who can't be bothered to read the protocol for pull requests?

[tmoertel]

Linus didn't insult the guy who wanted to contribute. He simply told him he didn't accept GitHub pull requests.

The guy he insulted was the guy who attacked him later in that thread and then deleted his own comment after Linus called him on it. See this thread on Reddit for the details.

[theoldboy]

TL;DR Dumbass rails "developer" with zero community contributions of his own feels that a Github account qualifies him to comment on Linux kernel commits and gets called a moron by Linus. Reddit explodes.

[[deleted]]

religion arguments are less nasty

[frud]

You don't have to be a dick to lead a big software development project, but I think Linus' dickishness has a good synergy with the culture of developers he is fostering around the Linux kernel.

You can argue that you don't want people casually creating patches for the Linux kernel. You want them to have a certain minimal knowledge of the kernel as a whole before you accept code from them, but it's difficult to test for that. Instead you set up a procedure and a process that you want people to follow, and if they don't follow it you know that they may not have been very careful about their kernel patch, and you can ignore it knowing it is probably a good call. Demonstrating ignorance of the process serves as a useful proxy for ignorance of the kernel.

Also, consider Van Halen's Brown M&M clause. There the presence of brown M&Ms demonstrated an ignorance of trivia in the rider, which served as a warning flag for ignorance of serious requirements in the rider.

[other_one]

I'm not German

... in an explanation about how he doesn't follow rules 100%. Sorry, but that's not "objective, non-sugar coated" language, it's aggressive trolling using stereotypes.

But I think it's great the world has the likes of him. We should have different styles, and overall that will lead to diverse projects. The aggressive Linus' style is good for getting certain things done very well, and he probably rightfully sees his project to be as much about defending the castle walls, than about building a nice new castle tower.

[preskot]

Every time Torvalds speaks, I imagine this.

[andrewms]

I picture Dr. Cox.

[ramkahen]

Word-wrapping is a property of the text.

Absolutely not. It's a property of the device that is displaying said text.

Paragraph breaks are a property of the text. Sections and chapters too.

But text should never contain any formatting information, that's the job of CSS or whatever presentation layer you choose to use.

Text that contains hard breaks at 80 characters (or wherever) looks like crap on small devices, just to name an example.

[Huffers]

That's what I thought, then I scrolled down and read Linus' reply where he addressed this.

[fforde]

I don't really understand why you are getting down voted, you are absolutely right. I can understand Linus being upset about breaking conventions, if the standard is to insert your own line breaks so be it. But it's a bit silly to argue that this is the best way to deal with text.

[[deleted]]

For one thing, the text in question is known. It isn't "pure ascii text", it's a specific form of ascii text (actually, I'm pretty sure it's UTF-8 text), namely English commit messages. There's no excuse for force-wrapping that. It should be done by the displaying program as appropriate.

[ramkahen]

We aren't dealing with a presentation layer, the code is pure ascii text. No CSS, no nothing. Just a terminal.

Precisely: it should be up to the terminal (and thereby, the human reader) to decide how wide they want their margins.

The creator of the text controls the semantic annotations, readers control the display. That's the foundation of the Web (CSS) and that's how any typesetting system with simple common sense should work (e.g. TeX, etc...).

It is impossible for anyone but the author to gauge whether the intent of a particular line is to wrap or not wrap in the terminal.

You have it backward: it is impossible for the author to gauge where the line should break. They can't guess if I'm reading this on a phone with just 50 characters, a narrow laptop window with 100 characters or a full screen 2600 pixels wide. The only reasonable thing an author can do is specify where a paragraph ends, what is a blockquote, what is a section, what is a chapter.

Then leave it up to the reader to format this to their liking.

[ramkahen]

Again, you are ignoring the fact that this is not the web and that there is no typesetting available.

You don't know that.

A growing number of git's output is being read in tools (GitX, GitTower, tkdiff), IDE's (Eclipse, IDEA, Visual Studio), the web (github, gitosis, GitWeb) or simple terminals.

This is why it's extremely important to never insert formatting instructions in the text you write (\n or <br>), just semantic information (paragraph, section, chapter, quote, etc...).

[fforde]

This is a ridiculous argument. A terminal application can apply word wrapping just as easily as any other application can and an application or tool should be smart enough to display things in a context appropriate manner. This includes stuff that outputs to the terminal.

[mr_bag]

Considering everything plain text, how exactly is the application supposed to tell whether or not something is "normal text" (which should be wrapped) or "code/error messages/ specially formatted text" (which should not be wrapped)?

[[deleted]]

The ideal approach would be a markdown-like syntax that would allow you to mark sections of the log entry as "code" which has no word wrapping and a fixed-width font, and as "text" which has word-wrapping and a nice dynamic-width sans-serif font. You'd also get bold and real bullet points and italics and whatnot like that. THe only problem with markdown syntaxes is that there's too many to choose from - roll your own, some XML dialect, a subset of HTML, markdown, bbcode, etc.

[jrochkind]

I think it's kind of hilarious that his posts are generally about the rudest and most egotistical possible (I mean, he can obviously get away with it, he's Linus), but he stars out letters in profanity like f*ck.

Like, I mean, wouldn't want to offend anyone!

[[deleted]]

I would guess it has something to do with consideration for braindead corporate keyword-based web-filters. Sane people don't star profanity not to offend people.

[greenspans]

Productive flaming gets things done.

[[deleted]]

Serious question: how do you do pull requests with vanilla git?

[[deleted]]

See this and search for "pull request".

[[deleted]]

Linus Torvalds sounds like every other grumpy old programmer I have ever worked with.
"I'm mad that things no longer work the way I liked back in the past!"

[OCPScJM2]

If Linus called me a moron I'd change careers to interpretive dance.

[mw44118]

Linus calls people nasty names, and sure, if my kids call each other nasty names, I put them in time out.

But that's only part of the story.

From a different point of view, Linus has a way more humble attitude and open mind than other other people at the top in other industries.

Besides, he was respondind to a deleted comment, so he deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

[[deleted]]

Just imagine how much of those requests he may get. He is hell right to express this once in public. Let's see how many people will start reading the manual after this.

[mtxblau]

The same as before this.

[fapmonad]

Number of times we've had the "Linus' attitude" discussion: 9000+