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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

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71–80 of 251 posts

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#71
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't much care whether Linus individually has the justification to be an asshole or not. The problem is that Linus being an asshole causes many other engineers to think it's ok/expected/encouraged to be assholes. All the non-assholes quietly disappear and we're left with a room full of assholes.

The whole "Linus is an asshole" is well overplayed, though. The guy's been developing Linux for 25 years, with most of his communications in the open. The kind of outburst he has once every few years, and which gets extensive coverage and discussion, is a weekly occurrence in many offices. It's just that we'll never hear of those.

And I've yet to see someone single out a particularly nice and constructive comment and use that for a counterpoint.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#72
post #35
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares how reasonable you are if you don't actually produce anything.

And nobody cares how much you produce if you're too unreasonable to sell them on your creation. Creating strawmen out of maximally-extreme arguments is silly. Unless you think that being reasonable is mutually exclusive with being productive?

True, but irrelevant for Linus. It's not a good way to get ahead[1], but if you're already far enough ahead...

Personally, I think I'm on "your" side -- as it were -- on the side of civility, but sometimes you've just got to get shit done. Properly, which sometimes means shouting the right things at the right people[2].

I do think it's unreasonable of you to say that Linus is not "being reasonable", as you've clearly implied in your comment. To my mind he's being entirely reasonable, just not very "polite" or "civil" or whatever you want to call it.

[1] As in: Rise up the corporate ladder.

[2] Sorkin's "Too Big To Fail" was a big eye-opener in this regard, FWIW.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#73

There's also Linus's personal aversion to how GitHub implements many opinionated workflows. > 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 tot…

He really talks in extremes. I see all his points but it doesn't make these things pure garbage.

> He really talks in extremes.

Easiest way to herd cats on a mailing list.

> I see all his points but it doesn't make these things pure garbage.

Well.. you see his points and his opinion. People are always in a hurry to take affront to this, but really, he's just putting the argument where it's ultimately going to end up anyways, and in the process, he gets to avoid the dozens of follow-up emails that fruitlessly attempt to convince him out of this opinion.

You're really only left with two options, disagree and move on, or fix the problems he has with it and try to get him to use it again later.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#76

There's also Linus's personal aversion to how GitHub implements many opinionated workflows. > 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 tot…

> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module,

Can anybody explain a little more about this module? I thought 'pull request' is Github only.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#77

Lost me at "And lots of people learned that monorepos are really painful, because past a certain size they just stop scaling." Plenty of counterexamples of monorepo projects much larger than Linux kernel.

True, but only in large organizations that can devote massive amounts of manpower and infrastructure and have extensive tooling to make it work.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#78

There's also Linus's personal aversion to how GitHub implements many opinionated workflows. > 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 tot…

> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, Can anybody explain a little more about this module? I thought 'pull request' is Github only.

Also, should it really be called merge request? What exactly are they pulling during the merge?

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#79

There's also Linus's personal aversion to how GitHub implements many opinionated workflows. > 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 tot…

It looks like github's pull requests and other features Linus had problems with have improved since 2012. Here is a pull request that Linus opened recently:

https://github.com/Subsurface-divelog/libdc/pull/7

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#80
post #35
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares how reasonable you are if you don't actually produce anything.

And nobody cares how much you produce if you're too unreasonable to sell them on your creation. Creating strawmen out of maximally-extreme arguments is silly. Unless you think that being reasonable is mutually exclusive with being productive?

> And nobody cares how much you produce if you're too unreasonable to sell them on your creation.

But Linus already has.

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