Linus Torvalds Promises Profanity Over Linux 3.10-rc5

hypnosec writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.10-rc5, and he is certainly not happy with the changes merged last week. Rc5 is bigger than rc4 and has code scattered across its entire code base because it addresses many outstanding problems. In the release announcement, Torvalds noted, 'I wish I could say that things are calming down, but I'd be lying. rc5 is noticeably bigger than rc4, both in number of commits and in files changed (although rc4 actually had more lines changed, so there's that).' Torvalds has warned that he is going to start cursing again, and said, 'I'm going to call you guys out on, and try to come up with new ways to insult you, your mother, and your deceased pet hamster.'"

Re:profanity

[Microlith]

No, it's why Linux has made so much progress. It has nothing to do with why "businesses choose Microsoft."

Torvalds is right

[Anonymous Coward]

When you are maintaining a project of this size and you get bothered by little annoying cosmetical fixes and non-critical bugs you do lose your temper. I have to say he stayed pretty civilized till now. I suggest we start a kick-starter project to give torvalds the vacation he really needs!

Re:Torvalds is right

[swalve]

Maybe he should train some devs to take over some of the stuff he's doing. If Linus's genius is the only thing that keeps Linux on track, he's doing it wrong. Delegate or Linux will not survive long term.

I don't get what the developers are thinking

[NotSoHeavyD3]

I mean speaking as a developer when I'm working and at this point I don't want to put in any new features. It's usually one of the managers or QA with a stupid "Hey lets put in a new feature right at the end" request.(And then it becomes "How willing am I to put up a fight over this?") I'm honestly surprised with no managers (and I mean business oriented managers) that this still happened.

Re:Profanity?

[Charliemopps]

I think most of us stopped listening to Linus quite a while ago. I've followed him on various social media platforms and it's been pretty clear that over time they have turned him into an asshole. Some people (myself included) should just avoid posting whatever they think at any time they want under their real name. He should just pick up some handle on slashdot and post away like I do. That way you can still be a dick and not have everyone hate you for it. And no, I'm not Linus... well, I don't think so anyway. I need to ask my shrink to be sure.

Re:Profanity?

[Stumbles]

Yeah he could do that and spend a lot of time spinning his wheels when a few well placed curses upon the offenders pet or pets would stop or reduce his spin time. Just how many times does he need to repeat himself after a while it becomes clear some public chastising might get their attention.

Re:first

[im_thatoneguy]

I would ask though whether that's useful or just technological masturbation.

When RAM is plentiful and cheap and even your average smartphone has more than 1GB of RAM are you sacrificing anything by only using a few MB of RAM instead of GBs?

There clearly is purely wasteful uses of RAM but there is also fully utilizing your available resources. RAM is cheap and plentiful. I would rather a system be responsive and fully featured than tick off some statistic on how few resources it uses. A 486 uses less power than an intel core i7. But you'll get a lot more per watt out of the i7.

Ultimately the metric I care about most is productivity.

Re:profanity

[Kjella]

Linux the kernel runs extremely well on everything from smartphones to supercomputers, obviously it's more than ready for the desktop. The challenge (remember, we don't have problems anymore) is the desktop environment and the applications, none of which are Linus' responsibility. And right now I'd take bets that Android hybrids conquers the desktop before Unity, Gnome 3, KDE or any of the existing solutions do. Too bad we can't clone him so he could run those projects too, because he's got both the doer gene and the manager gene. Forget about the kernel for a moment, remember the BitKeeper debacle? Other managers of a huge project like the kernel might do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone else but Linus who sits down and cranks out git on top of everything else. He's not just floating on past glory, he keep earning that respect he enjoys.

Re:Profanity?

[oatworm]

Pretty much this. There are three ways to handle disagreements:

1. Engage in a respectful, carefully thought out conversation weighing the pros and cons of each position, then achieving some sort of consensus.
2. "Agree to disagree", then passive-aggressively do your own thing or otherwise lobby with others to follow your path over the other person's path.
3. "Be a dick", call the person out, and make it clear that, since you're the one making the decisions, you are the one making that decision, not them.

Option 1 is great when you have nothing but time on your hands and/or when you're dealing with someone whose opinion you trust. It's also only useful when there's a clear definition of "right" and "wrong" regarding the topic at hand - more often than not, choices in life and engineering pretty much boil down to "which trade-offs suck less for the domain we're working in", which are more subjective than not in most cases. Option 2 is the default position drilled into our heads during school, which is a useful default when you're dealing with equals or people who you have no authority over - I mean, sure, you can yell and scream at them, but it's not like they're required to listen. The catch with option 2, though, is that, though it leads to less hurt feelings in the short run, you're as liable to have different factions competing against each other to prove who's "right", which can lead to some major issues down the road.

Option 3, meanwhile, is useful when you're in a hurry, a decision needs to be made now, and it needs to be made decisively. The goal here is to nip a problem in the bud before it metastasizes into something serious and political. In this case, Linus wants to enforce some discipline on the code review process because his time is finite and the deadline is near for 3.10 to get out the door, and "receive lots of crap code and reject it" doesn't solve that problem. He needs to not receive non-essential code in the first place. The only way to do that is by convincing those committing code to make only meaningful commits, either through well-defined requirements (tried; apparently that's failing), polite warnings (what Slashdot picked up here tonight), or "being a dick" (Linus will continue the beatings until morale improves if his warning isn't heeded).

Personally, I've found that the sort of people that claim "being a dick" is the sole refuge of people that enjoy being dicks are the sort of people that have a reflexive inability to defend their opinions under any sort of sustained criticism and just assume that, if their "brilliance" needs to be defended, it's because it's being witnessed by simpletons that just "don't get it". From where I'm sitting, that's a pretty dickish and passive-aggressive position to adopt and I... well, come to think of it, I actually do enjoy being a dick to people that think like that. Seriously, screw them.

Huh. Guess I pretty much proved the grandparent's point right there, didn't I?