Linus and Pull Requests (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#41

Post by andrewzah » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 4:44 AM UTC

ben0x539 wrote: post #33

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…

Getting jaded is a good excuse for taking a step back and reevaluating your life choices, and maybe finding another hobby. It's not a good excuse for going out of your way to hurt the feelings of people who aren't measuring up to your standards.

I don’t disagree that Linus has gone way overboard when chewing people out. The language in some of his rants is completely inappropriate, and he has since apologized for that. But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate.

“maybe finding another hobby”

It’s very easy to sit here in our armchairs and go “yeah he should just abandon his project”. I’m not sure how any of us would react to one of our projects growing to the scale linux has, but blithely suggesting one should just swap careers or hobbies (since programming is -just- a hobby apparently) is not productive at all.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#42

Post by ben0x539 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 4:47 AM UTC

dmart wrote: post #26

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 r…

The way that line wrapping works out between github and regular git is a shame, because apart from that, since markdown tries to emulate plaintext conventions, it's not hard at all to write commit messages that look good both as plaintext and as markdown. (In this case, use the "original" markdown code block syntax of indenting with a tab or four spaces instead of using backticks.)

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#43

Post by KirillPanov » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 4:49 AM UTC

To whoever [flagged] this submission: which HN rule does it violate?

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#44

Post by phist_mcgee » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 4:51 AM UTC

shakna wrote: post #23

bigyikes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

I will respectfully disagree with you. I am Australian, and have worked in many workplaces across white and blue collar jobs. What you are describing is an attitude that is fast falling out of favour, and in my mind has died in the last ten years. We do not have a culture of brutal honetsy, and I think that this is a good thing. That honesty may be refreshing to you, but there are many people in the workplace who do not communicate that way, and can be hurt or marginalised by that kind of manner.

You are perpetuating a myth of the straight shooting hard working everyman who calls it how he sees it. This is not the Australia I inhabit, and working with many foreign born individuals, along with different genders has proven to me that this strategy only perpetuates power imbalances among men.

Linus' behaviour would be a fireable offence in my last few workplaces, and I have worked in finance, in government, and in consulting.

I think you need to think a little more broadly about your idea of whether people will just 'suck it up and get on with it' attitude, and ask yourself if there are people you are hurting along the way.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#45

Post by ben0x539 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 4:52 AM UTC

azhenley wrote: post #17

Is this still true of GitHub's pull requests? Does Linus still not use them?

He does not, look at the graveyard that is https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclose...

The Linux kernel uses a development process that is very disjoint from common contemporary open-source practice, and easy to get wrong with modern tools that aren't specifically configured. It's indubitably a very effective process for their purposes but of course as an outsider I pretty much only ever hear about it when someone has a hard time with it...

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#46

Post by KirillPanov » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 4:56 AM UTC

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…

> it drives me up a wall when people use it in things like email or Markdown documents

Are there many editors that can rewrap long lines in a Markdown-aware way when displaying long lines?

I mean if you create an outline with significant nesting depth (like 3+ levels) and all the items are more than one screenwidth worth of text, the editor linewrapping is going to make it impossible to see the structure.

Otherwise you get this unreadable mess:

  .   + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar
  .   baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .     + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .   bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .       + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .   bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .     + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .   bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz

Instead of this visually-apparent structure at the left edge (produced using emacs's hard-rewrap command "fill-region"):

  .   + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar
  .     baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .     + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .       bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .       + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .         bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .     + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .       bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz

(I had to add the periods at the left edge to prevent HackerNews's awful markup processor from "helpfully" mangling things... apparently "verbatim" only means "verbatim" if the whole block has the same level of indentation or something)

Hard-wrapping is basically an acknowledgement that text editors are never going to understand the semantics of all the markups and programming languages we use. And web browser text-edit widgets will be even worse. Then there's the situation where you have markup-within-code-comments. I don't think it's reasonable to expect editors to recognize how to rewrap all these different cases intelligently.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#47

Post by phist_mcgee » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 4:56 AM UTC

andrewzah wrote: post #30

phist_mcgee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are 100% perpetuating the culture of 'deserved abuse' that I spoke about. People DO deserve respect. Everyone does, and I will assume someone is a good person until proven otherwise. People like yourself and linus create toxic communities of insular looking people hurling insults outward to people looking, and feel justified in their behaviour because they have trod the golden path to 'earning the right to not be belittled'.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#48

Post by jangid » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

I recall the "Linux is obsolete" thread. After a long time I read something like that.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#49

Post by ben0x539 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 5:02 AM UTC

andrewzah wrote: post #41

ben0x539 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting jaded is a good excuse for taking a step back and reevaluating your life choices, and maybe finding another hobby. It's not a good excuse for going out of your way to hurt the feelings of people who aren't measuring up to your standards.

I don’t disagree that Linus has gone way overboard when chewing people out. The language in some of his rants is completely inappropriate, and he has since apologized for that. But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate. “maybe finding another hobby” It’s very easy to sit here in our armchairs and go “yeah he should just abandon his project”. I’m…

We're talking about the point where someone has become jaded enough that they can't help themselves from lashing out at well-intentioned strangers. That's a fairly advanced level of jaded. I definitely consider myself jaded but I probably have a long way to go before I get there. I'm not saying you have to retrain into a different career path, but I think at that point it's not unreasonable to reflect on whether what you're doing with your spare time is really making you happy, and whether you wouldn't be better off for purely selfish reason if you gave up on project management and idk wrote some scuba software.

> But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate.

I don't think this is unqualifiedly the case, and I very much don't think this is the case in a situation where a hapless stranger's transgressions only go as far as wasting five minutes of your time by making an unacceptable pull request.

Re: Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

#50

Post by dmart » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 5:03 AM UTC

KirillPanov wrote: post #46

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…

> it drives me up a wall when people use it in things like email or Markdown documents Are there many editors that can rewrap long lines in a Markdown-aware way when displaying long lines? I mean if you create an outline with significant nesting depth (like 3+ levels) and all the items are more than one screenwidth worth of text, the editor linewrapping is going to make it impossible to see the structure. Otherwise y…

With your example of a nested list, VSCode will correctly display line-wrapped inner items at the same indentation level.