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Linus Explains his Patch Policy
An anonymous reader writes "For everyone who has been wondering the method behind Linus's seeming madness of accepting or dropping patches, he has finally given a thorough explanation. A must read for anyone who wants to get their favorite feature into the next release of the kernel."
He's admitting he's as failable as the next guy - the gist of what he's saying is that popping out of the woodwork and saying "hey, check this neat feature" isn't going to get your patch accepted into his kernel tree.
I highly doubt that any of the BSD maintainers would accept a patch either. It goes back to whether the trust is there, and evidently these guys don't hold Linus's trust.
Not much controversial here.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
Actually, Slackware uses the stock Linus tree - I guess on the principle that Patrick Volkerding knows that his target market knows what patches (if any) they want to apply...
Linus' tone might seem a bit aggressive and abrupt, but consider that this is message is a deep, deep down a very long thread that starts here.
From the very beginning, Linus was saying he thought this patch was something that should be driven by vendors - i.e. put it in their trees *first*, and then it may find a way into Linus' tree later.
Hence the constant references to 'this is my tree, this is how I do things'.
The whole thread is actually quite interesting. If you're thinking of suggesting a patch, I suggest you read the whole lot to get an idea about how best to approach it.
Quoting Linux from his post:
I think this says it all... don't whine... DO! If you want something in Linux, for god sakes, make a useful, meaniful contribution... don't whine about it on some out of the way, hole in the ground area...
Errr... Just for the record, Andrea Arcangeli is a guy.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
It's HIS TREE. HE CAN PLAY FAVORITES ALL HE LIKES.
He doesn't care if you go make your own, or if the world abandons his tree and goes to work on someone elses....
What part of this is hard to understand?
Right now, LFS needs a place for its servers...
o n. txt
http://community.linuxfromscratch.org/explanati
From The Linux Counter machine report:
Distribution
107953 registrations entered 109463 values
conectiva 1428 1.32%
debian 14625 13.55%
diy 1445 1.34%
mandrake 20342 18.84%
red hat 32051 29.69%
s.u.s.e 12481 11.56%
slackware 12782 11.84%
Others 14309 13.25%
This is probably somwhat skewed though, as root gets an email from Pat, which, amongst other helpful advice, invites us to register with the Linux Counter.
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
I really don't understand why the parent was labelled flaimbait. He hit the nail on the head, so to speak :p. Yes, I know, I'm full-blooded Japanese.
The problem is that you're misinterpreting the meaning of the proverb. It doesn't necessarily mean that you should conform, it's just an observation that straying from the pack results in increased hardships. Sometimes breaking off on your own is worth it, but the proverb is used to remind those who are too eager that they should think long and hard before making such a decision.
I'm talking about exact functional copies of software,
You mean like Quattro Pro (sued for having the exact same menus and keys as Lotus 123)?
It started with the original GNU programs-- feature-for-feature copies of AT&T's utilities--
So it would have been better to toss a new interface on? Why? From everything I've heard, the GNU utilities were and many ways still are vastly superior to the proprietary duplictates, from having more features to actually working when fed 8-bit data and 150-character lines.
In any case, what about Perl, TeX, Emacs and NetPBM? They all blazed trails where nobody else had gone.
Microsoft...
You mean the people who created yet another PDF? While open source people created DjVu, a format that can encode data in ways that make it feasible to put scans of books on the web?
lots of other people are already thinking.
Apparently a lot of people who don't actually use free software, and don't feel the need for some of these tools.
Cough... Emacs, X11... Cough.
Cough... Apache, Zope... Cough..
Cough.. Perl, Python, Ruby, Ocaml, PHP... Cough
Cough... Parrot, Zinc... Cough
Cough.. OpenBSD, SELinux, TurstedBSD, ErOS.. Cough..
Cough...L4 nanokernel, persistant processes, HURD... Cough
Cough.. Gnutella, Freenet.. Cough...
Unless you look, most of OSS's most innovative stuffis eiterh half hidden, or elseso pervasive that you forget it's there.
Did someone say something about nothing new comming from the OSS community? It's easy to point at a handful of things and say there's no innovation going on and then forget that if you do the same thing with MS you're stuck looking at WinME, Explorer (not IE, Explorer), Word, and Solitaire. There's a lot of OSS that has become so common that it may have passed below your radar. Pray tell, which non-Free products are Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Ocaml, Apache, Zope, SELinux, TrustedBSD, and L4-Hazelnut "exact functional coppies" of? I still don't see Microsoft or Sun's mandatory access controls.
I agree that the OSS community sometimes does things that give the impression that all of the OSS projects are cheap ripoffs. However, I think that at least in terms of operating systems and languages, you'll see that OSS leads the pack in innovation. (No, I don't consider the JVM or the CLR at all innovative. Dis is an innovative non-Free virtual machine, but it's the only one I've seen.)
Oh, and I have an IRIX box. It's a poor excuse for a modern *NIX. (No, I'm not just being a Linux fanboy, Solaris, *BSD, etc. are great *NIXes in thier own ways. (Even Solaris x86). IRIX's only redeaming feature is that it's pretty and I love the hardware.) As soon as I port the code that's on there, it's getting Debianized.
For the record, I'd also like to point out that both MS and Apple's default window managers don't compare favorablywith many of the X11 WMs out there, and it's highly non-trvial to change window managers. (Running X11 doesn't work with most of thier programs, so that doesn't count. Third party WMs for MS OSes suffer stability problems, appearently stemming from an insufficiently reverse-engineered API.)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.