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Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

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Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#221

Post by nknight »

dblock wrote: post #160
trotsky wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's always been like that. Really that was the status quo in open source 10-15+ years ago. People were abrasive, efficiency oriented and most of the communities didn't have very many soft edges. Just off the top of my head I'm thinking of Theo de Raadt, Miguel de Icaza, Richard Stallman - hell if you were a nice guy you didn't make it on usenet back then. In the last 5 or 10 years there has been a strong shift towar…

Well said. Matz is a perfect example of what Linus is not and can never be.

I don't have a lot of first-hand context for Matz's behavior, not being a Ruby developer, but it's entirely possible, even likely, that in the context of Japanese culture, Matz's niceness would not be seen as especially remarkable. Pitting one person's "niceness" against another when they are products of vastly different cultures is questionable at best.

To most westerners, the average Japanese person is extremely polite, if not bordering on the absurd, while to most Japanese, the average westerner is, to say the least, unrefined, and Torvalds is probably downright horrifying.

Such things must be taken in their cultural context, or you can't really understand people's behavior at all.

Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#222

Post by kajecounterhack »

benatkin wrote: post #219
natep wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. He clearly stated his reasons why his text wrapping approach is objectively superior (not correct). If you think he's delusional, point out the criterion he has failed to consider, or explain how some other system meets any of his criteria better. In response to the pull request he did simply say "I don't do github pull requests." and explained why, and basically said he would if github supported commit messages i…

Apparently "Joseph" deleted his comment (very un-git-like of GitHub to make deleting a comment without a trace so easy). I checked all the other participants above where "Joseph" posted and found a Dan, but no Joseph.

Joseph said something snarky along the lines of "Oh I'm Linus Torvalds, I'm always right" -- I think Linus was overreacting, but he was at least a little justified. He seems to get very angry when people state anything more than what's based on "facts."

Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#223

Post by jarek »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #196
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?

Okay. Thanks for the downvote, so I'll ask again, "what?". I don't know what you're talking about and have never experienced anything that might fit that description. Can you offer an example.

Sorry to see you downvoted.

Reflowing refers to reconstructing lines broken by line wrapping. Here's the example I was referring to: Grab a couple of unwrapped paragraphs of lorem ipsum (make sure there's no explicit newlines) and email them to yourself as a plain-text email using the desktop web gmail interface. You will notice that when you open the email in your inbox, it shows up with line breaks - Gmail sent it with explicit newlines after ~80 characters. (Use Show Original if you want to confirm.)

Now open the same email in the Gmail app on Android (I'm using Gmail 2.3.6 - the newest available on my Androids 2.2 and 2.3.6). My Android screen, like most smartphone screens, isn't wide enough to hold all 80 characters in one line, it's more like 50 or 60 characters. Gmail wraps the email to fit, which is expected and desirable. The problem is it keeps the original linebreaks at 80 characters, resulting in two linebreaks. Every other line is short at 20 or 30 characters and the email looks very jagged. Reading it is very uncomfortable. It gets really messy when you have quoted text, particularly with interleaved response style.

There's actually a whole bunch of standards or semi-standards and techniques around doing this kinda stuff. Standalone mailers have been doing reflowing and format=flowed for a while now. Sad to see Gmail drop the ball on this.

Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#224

Post by jamesflorentino »

For people wondering why Linus said "You are a moron" to a particular user named "Joseph": The comment he was replying to was deleted. https://github.com/pirtlj

in one of his comment, "I did not realizes that Linus' shit does not stink. Thanks for clearing that up..."

Apparently, even if a comment gets deleted from a Github discussion, it still sticks to your public activity.

Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#225

Post by ergo14 »

mindstab wrote: post #70
eridius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: Considering GitHub popularized git, if I were in charge of git I'd listen to what the GitHub guys have to say about it.

Depends where. Projects like the linux kernel (obviously), Xorg and Firefox had all moved to git before github ever showed up. It was well on it's way to popularity all on its own merits

Mozilla uses mercurial as far as I can tell ;-)

Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#226

Post by tomp »

marcamillion wrote: post #97
Karunamon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus is kind of infamous for his rants and have been for years (especially on the mailing lists.. I've seen him tear into people for willful ignorance on the kernel dev lists more than once). I've never really seen them as cranky because they're spot on. Cranky old men usually don't have anything other than opinion behind their rantings.. Linus can at least defend his position. Given his contributions to the world o…

Well...this debate always seems to come down to...do we let geniuses just do whatever the hell they want. The answer is...I am not sure. Either way, there are many decisions that people make that comes down to style preference and sure the 'purists' might think it is a watering down of programming....but it makes it more appealing to new developers. I can see Torvalds ranting on Ruby as not a 'real' language....I don…

> do we let geniuses just do whatever the hell they want. The answer is...I am not sure.

Hm... how about letting everybody do whatever the hell they want??

Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#228

Post by DCoder »

benatkin wrote: post #219
natep wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. He clearly stated his reasons why his text wrapping approach is objectively superior (not correct). If you think he's delusional, point out the criterion he has failed to consider, or explain how some other system meets any of his criteria better. In response to the pull request he did simply say "I don't do github pull requests." and explained why, and basically said he would if github supported commit messages i…

Apparently "Joseph" deleted his comment (very un-git-like of GitHub to make deleting a comment without a trace so easy). I checked all the other participants above where "Joseph" posted and found a Dan, but no Joseph.

Reddit[1] found the "Joseph" in question, his comments are still visible in his public activity stream: https://github.com/pirtlj

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/tionj/linus_tor...

Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#229

Post by luriel »

marcamillion wrote: post #116
Karunamon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't see how the head Linux kernel dev has been pushing the community foward? Okay then.

Heh.....you misunderstood me. I have never once bashed his contributions to the community and OSS. Just like I would never do the same for the creators of Java, C, PHP, all of which I don't use and have no interest in. But there is significant value in all of them and we are all better off for their existence. My point was, more often than not....you hear the creators of these 'foundational' contributions complaining…

> Java, C, PHP, all of which I don't use and have no interest in. But there is significant value in all of them and we are all better off for their existence.

I doubt we are better off for PHP's existence (only mentioning the oxymoron "PHP security" should be enough to make this point), many would argue the same for Java (unless you are a consultant or book publisher), and some have argued the same for C.

And just because something is new doesn't make it good, in the programming world the number of square wheels built grows every day, and we are in danger of the resulting mountain collapsing and burying us all in a tangle of inscrutable complexity of bad solutions to problems that were solved long ago.

Re: Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

#230

Post by drothlis »

why-el wrote: post #46
mjs wrote: post #35

It's instructive to read Linus's commits to his hobby project "subsurface": https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/commits/master Even if I can't code like Linus, I can at least try to write commit messages like his…

It always puzzled me why his commits (and in fact standard commits) ought to start with a verb that is not in its past form. When I started using git four months ago (such a newbie), I would write something like "Fixed this" instead of "Fix this". Anybody with more insights on this? I am just curious.

According to http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messa... (linked in one of the comments in the github discussion) it is for consistency with the commit message generated by 'git merge' and the like.
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