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Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

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Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#21

Post by phist_mcgee »

andrewzah wrote: post #11
phist_mcgee wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what purpose does that antagonism serve? I fundamentally reject the way linus treats people, and I think him hiding behind his maintainer position is even more petty. A lord of his kingdom, rude and sarcastic to everyone who comes and visits. I will never accept someone as hostile as he is in my workplace, and I think the only way he gets away with it, is by surrounding himself with other people who express thems…

Reminder that Linus is part of the reason you and I have a job in the first place. How many people contribute to the linux kernel? Let’s see how quickly you get jaded after dealing with people refusing to read basic instructions. Also, reminder that not every contributor is desirable. Linus has a specific vision and criteria for his project. It’s true he could use kinder language, but I imagine he gets fed up having…

Jaded is not an excuse for abuse. That's like a parent saying that their children's bad behaviour is an excuse to abuse them. It is not ok to treat people that way, and no amount of being fed up justifies it.

Also I do not accept the idea that my job exists because of him, so I have to have deference. Again, this is an abusive way to look at things, and puts people on pedestals that they deserve respect, but we do not deserve it in turn.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#23

Post by shakna »

bigyikes wrote: post #14
dmart wrote: post #10

This was an interesting comment thread, and honestly you have to hand it to Linus for continuing to respond and expand on his viewpoints in a pretty level-headed way. Also, I was reading through it on a phone, which brought to light an interesting point regarding the hard line-wrapping discussion that occurs further on down the thread: when you hard-wrap your lines, you're also defining a minimum line width, under wh…

Was he level-headed? Talking like that at work might get me fired. It would be better if he just ignored the PR instead of making a scene. Maybe I’m just sensitive

> Was he level-headed? Talking like that at work might get me fired.

In my experience, this is very much a cultural thing.

The way Linus talks is the usual way that people talk at most of the workplaces I've been at over the years in Australia. However, we're not exactly known as a sensitive people. If something is crap, we call it crap. It isn't generally taken personally. It isn't seen as overly aggressive. If someone is failing to get a point, they will get called an idiot, but people will continue to explain. It isn't seen as a personal attack, just normal frustration.

However, when dealing with other national backgrounds, we're also expected to adapt our behaviour. The number of times I get a 'yes' answer from Asia that absolutely does not mean 'yes' is probably in the high double figures per day. Americans tend to expect the "compliment sandwhich" when you need to point out a flaw in their work, and will take it personally if you say that they've chosen the wrong approach. There's less of a divorce between the work and the person.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#24

Post by phist_mcgee »

bigyikes wrote: post #14
dmart wrote: post #10

This was an interesting comment thread, and honestly you have to hand it to Linus for continuing to respond and expand on his viewpoints in a pretty level-headed way. Also, I was reading through it on a phone, which brought to light an interesting point regarding the hard line-wrapping discussion that occurs further on down the thread: when you hard-wrap your lines, you're also defining a minimum line width, under wh…

Was he level-headed? Talking like that at work might get me fired. It would be better if he just ignored the PR instead of making a scene. Maybe I’m just sensitive

If I called a coworker a moron on a PR, I would be disciplined or fired. We have a zero tolerance for disrespect in our workplace, and I do not think that his status as a 'superstar programmer' should allow him the privilege to call people names. Even if he works for free, it is not ok to think of and treat others this way.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#25

Post by staticassertion »

fermienrico wrote: post #3

Curious - why do people get offended by Torvalds? If you know anything about the guy, his rants are a caricature. It's like going for a Tarantino movie and expecting no violence. You're going to get violence. And, it's going to be excessive, over-the-top, ridiculously offensive that there is no other explanation than to treat it as comedy. Any other attempt to explain Linus is flapping wings in a vaccuum. If I was on…

Torvalds solved low hanging fruit problems (reimplementing a version control system with a permissive license, implementing a toy OS with a permissive license) when computer science and programming were niche skills, and for that he's become a highly paid celebrity with a cult following that forgives him for anything. It's so embarrassing to see people celebrate abuse years after the fact, I honestly cringe at these threads. I pity people who relish the idea of being attacked by someone they respect and I wish we could all just move past this dumb hero worship culture.

P.S. please add a (2012) to the topic, this is NINE years old who cares.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#26

Post by dmart »

alxmng wrote: post #19

Hard line wraps are moronic, just like spaces for tabs. It’s an abuse of the newline character, which is meant to represent a new line, not word wrapping. It also destroys the information of where actual newlines are placed. There’s no way to automatically strip out the newlines meant for word wrapping, while leaving newlines meant for new lines. To use your words Linus: You’re a moron!

In the general case, I agree (with the first part of your comment.)

But Linus makes a valid case for wrapping at the time of text entry instead of display: they want to wrap to 72 characters except in certain, specific cases, like when you have lines of output that should be represented verbatim.

Now, if you're using something like Markdown, this is no problem: triple-backtick the code block and let the rest of the regular text wrap automatically. But since kernel commit messages are strictly plain text only, that's not an option.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#27

Post by [deleted] »

danielsht wrote: post #15

Reasonable people can disagree on things like formatting, features, or the superiority of one interface/product over another... all fair game. And Linus’ contributions give him an enormous amount of credibility and leeway to have it his way. But when you treat people with such disrespect (ex. By calling them a moron), you lose all credibility and respect in my book. There should be no excuse for treating people with…

[deleted]

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#28

Post by ben0x539 »

fermienrico wrote: post #3

Curious - why do people get offended by Torvalds? If you know anything about the guy, his rants are a caricature. It's like going for a Tarantino movie and expecting no violence. You're going to get violence. And, it's going to be excessive, over-the-top, ridiculously offensive that there is no other explanation than to treat it as comedy. Any other attempt to explain Linus is flapping wings in a vaccuum. If I was on…

Torvalds ca. 2012, via callous and hyperbolically insulting comments, makes people feel bad to get what he wants. We can argue about whether he gets to do that because his job is very important, or because we also want what he wants (eg high quality commit messages), or because people shouldn't interact with Linux if they can't deal with that, or whether it's an effective way to get what he wants, but at the end of the day the mechanism is still making people feel bad.

I think the negative effect that has or could be reasonably expected to have on the subjects of his comments is enormous and fundamentally unjustifiable in the context of running an open source project or a community. I sort of get it when it's aimed at an adversarial higher-order entity like NVidia (or Github for not letting you turn off pull requests on your repos), but absolutely not with human beings, no matter how frustrating it is to have to work with people who aren't fluent in your processes.

I think we should try to be kinder than that, and I don't think being kinder would have stopped Torvalds from getting useful patches out of contributors.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#29

Post by drenvuk »

danielsht wrote: post #15

Reasonable people can disagree on things like formatting, features, or the superiority of one interface/product over another... all fair game. And Linus’ contributions give him an enormous amount of credibility and leeway to have it his way. But when you treat people with such disrespect (ex. By calling them a moron), you lose all credibility and respect in my book. There should be no excuse for treating people with…

You sound like a middle manager to me. The people at the bottom or top don't worry about this crap and will call a spade a spade.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#30

Post by andrewzah »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #21
andrewzah wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that Linus is part of the reason you and I have a job in the first place. How many people contribute to the linux kernel? Let’s see how quickly you get jaded after dealing with people refusing to read basic instructions. Also, reminder that not every contributor is desirable. Linus has a specific vision and criteria for his project. It’s true he could use kinder language, but I imagine he gets fed up having…

Jaded is not an excuse for abuse. That's like a parent saying that their children's bad behaviour is an excuse to abuse them. It is not ok to treat people that way, and no amount of being fed up justifies it. Also I do not accept the idea that my job exists because of him, so I have to have deference. Again, this is an abusive way to look at things, and puts people on pedestals that they deserve respect, but we do no…

I said part of the reason, not the sole reason. His projects have had immeasurable impact on computing, and it’s arrogant to dismiss that because you don’t like how he conducts himself.

He can definitely do better regarding his language, that I agree with. But this specific instance isn’t even against the contributor but against GitHub.

“they deserve respect, but we do not deserve it in turn”

Nobody deserves respect. You may be referring to basic decency towards each other. He earned respect with his work and maintainership over the years and decades. Abusive language towards contributors is not appropriate, but that doesn’t mean they -deserve- respect either. The first step to becoming respected is learning to RTFM and submit patches according to how a project expects them. And for basically every rant of his I’ve seen, it was directed at someone who 100% should’ve known better, not random new submitters.

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