Torvalds Gets Tough on Kernel Contributors 246
ChocLinux writes "Linus Torvalds is cracking down on developers that add last-minute changes to the kernel during the two-week merge window. He says: 'If people miss the merge window or start abusing it with hurried last-minute things that just cause problems for -rc1, I'll just refuse to merge, and laugh in their faces derisively when they whine plaintively at me, and tell them there's going to be a new opening soon enough.'"
Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I guess he can't win huh? It's difficult being in his position. He wants the work to get done and he wants to make people happy. I guess him saying, "People always complain that I'm being too soft. Not so this time," is the result of all the grief he puts up with.
Just let it go as long as the patches still come in
Re:And Linus complains about Slashdot.... (Score:5, Informative)
And you "wisely" drop the following sentence from what your quoting.
Here's the quote in context:
>>>
Gaah. I don't tend to bother about slashdot, because quite frankly, the
whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with
people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any
random topic, whether they know anything about it or not.
[ And don't get me wrong - I follow slashdot too, exactly because it's fun
to see people argue. I'm not complaining
And I don't tend to worry about the Inquirer and the Register, because
both of them are all about being rough and saying things in ways that
might not be acceptable in other places, and that's what makes them fun to
read. So when they then write something nasty about Linux (or me), hey, it
goes with the territory.
So much for Linus complaining about slashdot.
You trolling Sucker.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
It appears to be a reference to a really bad comic book [google.ca].
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Also said... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
The first thing that came up is that Andrew Morton doesn't know which of the things in the testing tree are going in this cycle, because people haven't said anything in the middle of the window. So the first problem would be solved if everybody said at the beginning of the window that they're intending to submit something, but not quite yet.
The real issue, it turns out, is that James Bottomley (the SCSI maintainer) is in an untenable position. He's supposed to get patches from developers, integrate them, and submit them to Linus. But the developers waited for 2.6.14 to come out before they rebased their patches on it, and then took most of the window rebasing the patches, leaving James not enough time to determine for sure if all of these patches actually work correctly together before the window closes.
Furthermore, Linus would like to get infrastructure changes in before driver changes, so that it's easier to debug. It's hard to figure out what's wrong if you get both an infrastructure change that shouldn't affect anything in the driver, but might due to a bug and a driver change that should affect the driver behavior. It's a lot nicer if you can say whether the infrastructure change had any effect at all on what the driver does, and know right away which part to debug. But that depends on getting things included in a particular order.
I suspect that part of the problem is that the new release cycle is new, and contributors are not yet convinced that they can rebase their patches against 2.6.14-rc3 and have them apply cleanly to 2.6.14, and it will not be such an issue once people have gotten used to it.