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."

Comments

It's my kernel...

[charlie763]

Remember the kid in school that would always say, "My ball, my rules"?

Take note that Linus decided to remind us nine times that it is his tree. I am a big fan of Linux, but not so much of Linus. The way he wrote that letter made him seem a bit childish.

I just wanted to get my thoughts out there. There is no need to mod me down.

Right on!

[IdleTime]

I have to say I agree with The Man.

My company (which sells a commercial product to run under Linux) have produced several enhancements to the kernel and have been able to get some of them into the Linus' Tree, some were not accepted, but is now incorporated into a well known Linux Distribution.

It all boils down to what I would call the Mitnik Factor (Tm). Namely how good your social skill is, i.e. how good you are to convince Linux in a PROFESSIONAL way that the patch you have made actually will add a value to the general kernel release and that the whole community will be better off with the patch in Linus' Tree rather than outside of it. (Now that is ofcourse the hard part)

Linus' dead-on

[dh003i]

I don't know what this patch is or what it does, and I really don't care.

No-one's patch is entitled to be incorporated into Linus' tree. It is his tree, and he puts stuff in there that he feels is the best. Would you really want Linus putting something in his tree which he didn't feel good about or was unsure of? When Linus puts something in his tree, that's his certification that he thinks it's good and useful. Its his word on that in a sense. The minute he starts putting stuff in because people pester him, his word that something is good and useful to his knowledge becomes useless.

Chances are that if the patch is good, Linus will accept it provided he's given enough time to properly evaluate it. Linus is a human being like the rest of us. He can't thoroughly evaluate hundreds of patches coming in a week before the feature-freeze deadline. Try to give him the same breathing room to do a job you'd give anyone else. Also, remember, Linus doesn't have to do anything. He's doing this voluntarily as a service to the public. If you think you're patch is good and useful enough to be incorporated, and Linus rejected it, then go out and prove that its good. Put it in you're own tree or convince a vendor to do so; then people will use it, and if its good, word will get around. Once that happens, more likely than not, Linus will put it in his tree.

I've submitted about a hundred articles to Slashdot, many of them on what I thought were good "your rights online" issues. Do you know how many submissions of mine have been accepted? 1. It was on Creg Ventor, the man who used his own DNA to help sequence the human genome; ironically, I thought that was one of my worst submissions. Yet, believe it or not, you don't see me whining to the editors of Slashdot or in the discussions about it. I realize that many many many other submissions have been made, that the editors have to choose what they feel is best, and that they have to create a variety; I also realize that they're human beings.

Other people would do well to do the same in regards to patches.

Summary

[jbolden]

Figured I'd post a quick summary of the underlying issue.

There is a patch that has strong vendor support (like vendors have already signed contracts involving services from this patch).
This patch is a service offered on many other commercial unixes (Irix, Solaris, AIX, etc..)
Linus considers this patch:
a) to be dangerous
b) to be difficult to test
c) likely to have the most problems on the x86 platform which is Linux's home platform
d) supporting it might add long term maintainability problems to the kernel

The kernel hackers whom Linus trusts seem to agree with his assessment.

What Linus wants is
a) for the vendors to support this patch over a long period of time on a wide range of systems.
b) For there to be some evidence that Linux users (as opposed to Linux vendors) actually want this feature.

So what you have is a fight between big guns: Suse, United Linux, IBM.. and Linus.

Of interest might be....

[Skeezix]

You might also find Havoc's article on Free Software Maintenance interesting.

Re:how about this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You're missing my point. I'm not talking about "clones" or "ripping off." I'm talking about exact functional copies of software, the only distinguishing characteristic of which is that the developer or developers give away the source. It started with the original GNU programs-- feature-for-feature copies of AT&T's utilities-- and went forward from there. If I make a spreadsheet program, that's one thing. If I replicate the precise features and functions of somebody else's spreadsheet program, that's something else.

There's just no innovation to speak of going on in the open source community. Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and other companies are trying like hell to come up with something new. Sun basically redefined the web application over the past few years with Java and related technologies. Apple is trying to design a user interface from a blank slate, and doing a pretty damn good job. Microsoft... well, say what you want about them, but they're trying like crazy to come up with new ideas like Hailstorm and SOAP. Not every idea is a good one, but at least they're new and different.

Let's see some examples of new ideas in the open source community. KDE and Gnome are fighting it out to see which one can be the blandest, least user-friendly desktop environment. Linux, as neat as it is, is caught between trying to catch up to the leading server OS's, like Solaris or IRIX, and trying to catch up to desktop OS's like OS X and XP. It's doing an okay job of both, but not an exceptional one of either. And think of all the brainpower that's being wasted on dumb ideas like the Mozilla sidebar! If only the community rewarded-- through peer validation or whatever you open-source guys use for currency-- original ideas, instead of incomplete implementations of other people's ideas, we might actually see something revolutionary and interesting come out of the open source community. As it stands right now, all I see is a bunch of projects whose names really ought to start with the words "yet another."

Mod me down if you feel that's the right thing to do. This post is definitely off-topic, except to the extent that I'm extending an idea I introduced upthread. And it's flamebait only inasmuch as I will certainly get flamed for it. It's not a troll, but I'm sure people who disagree with me will hold the opinion that it is.

So moderators, do what you must. But know before you do that I'm just saying what lots and lots of other people are already thinking.