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A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

lkml.iu.edu

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Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#241

Post by ForHackernews »

alien_at_work wrote: post #198
jordigh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> John Johansen will survive. We really need to stop excusing Linus's behaviour. Just because we may happen to agree with what he is saying doesn't mean we also have to agree with how he is saying it.

No, what we need to do is stop listening to fragile cry babies. If you ever work for a real company with real deadlines you'll get a lot worse than what he gave. And he only responded this way after 3 weeks of unacceptable behavior. If he blew up out of nowhere after the very first report of a potential problem before it was even confirmed, that would be a different story (though that's something that probably happen…

> If you ever work for a real company with real deadlines you'll get a lot worse than what he gave.

I think you must have worked for some horribly unprofessional companies. I've worked places with tight deadlines before, but berating your colleagues or employees with profanity is just ridiculous. I would walk out on the spot if anyone spoke to me the way Linus did in that email.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#242

Post by bluejekyll »

golergka wrote: post #231
bluejekyll wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The emotion definitely shows how angry he is, but it is possible to express yourself without getting angry; to be clear, concise, and impossible to misconstrue. Ass-chewing isn't generally beneficial as it makes people defensive and potentially angry themselves. The mea culpa is good: "And again sorry, I screwed up, it should not have happened, my perspective was incorrect and I know I need to make it right." This is…

> As someone who's gotten chewed out before, all it does is leave a bad taste in your mouth and most likely going to quit the company or possibly the project. That seems to be his direct intent, and being angry does help get this point across.

I don’t think that’s really what Linus wants (obviously we’re speculating here). He was trying to make it clear that breaking the first rule of kernel development is not negotiable. Anger and swearing isn’t needed to express that, let me reiterate, this is what does that:

> the threat of rejecting future commits and/or rejecting his opinions was by far the best thing in Linus' response, b/c those cut straight to your potential to contribute to the project.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#243

Post by ams6110 »

city41 wrote: post #174
leeoniya wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linus has made it incredibly damn clear what "no user space regressions ever" mean out of curiosity, how does a policy like this translate to microkernel OSes (e.g. Redox) where most everything runs in userspace?

Does it need to? This is the rule for Linux development. Other kernels need not follow it if it doesn’t make sense.

Yes, exactly. Linus does things his way. Others (OpenBSD and maybe other BSDs for example) view the kernel + userland as a complete release and you upgrade everything together.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#244

Post by throw2016 »

The only time Linus gets talked about here is in context of conflicts. This creates a fabricated one sided image of a person who has now given us Linux and Git.

Its not a corporation, the tradition and history is completely different, the levels of formality are much lower and the context and culture is completely new.

There is no traditional hierarchy and the authoritarian structure that most including commentators here work under in the corporate world.

No one works for Linus and he has zero power over anyone. Commentators pretend its all roses in their world yet the corporate world is full of people who have power over others and are actually abusive.

Linus's emails are tame stuff and those casually comparing this to abusive behavior are simply devaluing actual abusive behavior that becomes possible under non transparent authoritarian structures.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#245

Post by spdionis »

hyperpape wrote: post #74
chii wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my application depends on some of those zero'd fields, it seems like that has potential to cause serious debugging problems, as opposed to just causing an error on the parse. if your app didn't used to handle the 'zero' case (assuming zero was a "valid" value for said field), then the app was poorly written and would'be been broken in the first place. However, if the app _did_ handle the 'zero' case, then the ap…

There are many cases where continuing with invalid data is much worse than a parse error. Perhaps that's less likely in this case (hopefully your credit card payment doesn't depend on the values in /proc/ /stat), but as a rule, silently continuing with meaningless data is scary.

Not when the application was to supposed to handle the invalid data anyway before.

Because you had to handle the zero case before right?

The idea is that in the worst case you get an error message, not an altogether crash.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#246

Post by sepeth »

raverbashing wrote: post #173
sepeth wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Really? Ask that to a child beaten up by their parents in the street. I am sure that child won't make the same mistake again. I am not interested about if Linus is right or wrong, many other people have done that already. I am more interested the way that he speaks. I am gonna go ahead and say it. The way he speaks in this email is ugly, wrong, and should never be encouraged. The language we use is important, ev…

> The way he speaks in this email is ugly, wrong If that's the way problems get solved, then he's right in using it If you ask nicely and people don't do it, or keep ignoring it then you up the tone

And to the people who actually help you.

Not only your users are important, people who help you are also important.

> If you ask nicely and people don't do it, or keep ignoring it then you up the tone

I am sure it can be done much better with a little effort. Being smart, or being someone who has done something important shouldn't exempt you from being nice to other people.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#247

Post by abritinthebay »

taneq wrote: post #207
bjourne wrote: post #42

John Johansen will survive. Linus has made it incredibly damn clear what "no user space regressions ever" mean. See f.e the similar rant from 2012: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 And it is his kernel so it is his rules. John Johansen admitted he messed up ( http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/02539.html ) and promised to handle things better in the future so all is well.

> http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/02539.html Wow. Now that's how you do an apology. If anything my confidence in this guy is increased.

Simple. Contrite. To the point. No excuses, just solutions.

Yeah, this is a _very_ professional response to a (typical for Linus tbh) very emotional (but correct) post that could be easy to react emotionally to.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#248

Post by greggyb »

majewsky wrote: post #141
pjmlp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich Hickey has a wonderful talk about it. "Spec-ulation" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk Which I fully agree with, basically there are no major, minor, patch level changes, in reality every change is a possible breaking changes, because we don't control what downstream is doing with our software.

> there are no major, minor, patch level changes, in reality every change is a possible breaking changes I noticed this when recently writing a spec that defines backwards-compatibility. There's surprisingly few things you can do when you want to stay backwards-compatible.

It's much like an immutable data store. You get one operation: insert.

With full backward compatibility, you agglomerate features, and changes are implemented as optional, with the default being the old behavior.

You can add layers that depend on existing code, but you cannot make existing code depend on those new layers.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#249

Post by WhitneyLand »

megaman22 wrote: post #164

Linus is such a breath of fresh air. I'll take an honest, emotional, impossible to misconstrue, ass-chewing over the alternatives. Too often there's an avoidance of straightforward, blunt speech that conveys exactly what is meant. I really have better things to do than try to parse nonspecific beating-around-the-bush and deconstruct word-castles.

Your comment shows the downside of assholes being effective. People so often have to deal with ineffectiveness, they come to feel happy with anything they can get that works, forgetting that’s it almost always possible to be just as direct, blunt, and compelling with different rhetoric.

Assholism is not the solution to great leadership. It’s one of many techniques leaders use. Some leaders are effective using it frequently, but it’s important to note it’s usually not required because there are trade offs and downsides, both morally and amorally from a pure efficiency standpoint.

Re: A regression is the kernel not giving the same result with the same user space

#250

Post by abritinthebay »

jordigh wrote: post #152
bjourne wrote: post #42

John Johansen will survive. Linus has made it incredibly damn clear what "no user space regressions ever" mean. See f.e the similar rant from 2012: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 And it is his kernel so it is his rules. John Johansen admitted he messed up ( http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/02539.html ) and promised to handle things better in the future so all is well.

> John Johansen will survive. We really need to stop excusing Linus's behaviour. Just because we may happen to agree with what he is saying doesn't mean we also have to agree with how he is saying it.

Agreed but I don't think that it's going to happen.

We tend to excuse people for being bratty assholes when they're smart and correct. Which Linus was here.

Doesn't make it right but it's not just a Linus problem (I mean, generally), it's a people problem.

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