Linus on All Sorts of Stuff

Linux Times.Net writes " Linus Torvalds tells of some other programming venues than the Linux kernel, predicts a shadowy outcome for GNU/Hurd, gives some advice to anyone wanting to undertake a large software project and updates us on the latest in kernel development in this email interview by Preston St. Pierre. "

Comments

About to be /.'ed

[GuyZero]

This is moments from being /.'ed to death...

Article text

Linus Torvalds: ''Desktop Market has already started''
Preston St. Pierre of Linux Times interviews Linus Torvalds.

Linus Torvalds tells of some other programming venues than the Linux kernel, predicts a shadowy outcome for GNU/Hurd, gives some advice to anyone wanting to undertake a large software project and updates us on the latest in kernel development in this email interview by Preston St. Pierre.

Preston: Your life has been dedicated for quite some time to the Linux kernel. If this project was no longer yours, what kind of project would you most like to take on next (games, user applications, another kernel, development tools, etc)?

Linus Torvalds: I like being close to the hardware, and doing good visuals (ie games or GUI's) is not my forte, so I'd probably work on development tools or similar.

In fact, the only project I've actually spent some time on in the last year (apart from the kernel, of course) has been this source checker application that does some extended type-checking for the kernel. So very much a development tool.

Preston: What is your favorite interpreted programming language, and why?

Linus Torvalds: Heh. I don't much do interpreters. The only one I end up using consciously (ie not part of somebody else's scripts) end up being just the regular shell. It's not that I dislike things like perl/python, it's just that I tend to either just write C, or do _so_ simple things that shell works fine for me.

I might admit to having a soft spot for basic, but I haven't actually used it in closer to twenty years or so. But it was what I started with, so it will always be special ;)

Preston: Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?

Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.

So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.

And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.

In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had _expected_ to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.

Preston: From a user's prospective, what improvements do you see the Linux kernel offering over Hurd? Do you think Hurd might eventually become as popular as Linux?

Linus Torvalds: I think Hurd is dead. See above on why. It has a "big vision", and people forgot about the details, and forgot about admitting when they went wrong. So the project stumbled, and _still_ didn't bother to look down on the ground. But hey, I might be wrong. I haven't actually followed Hurd in any detail, and maybe the project is more down-to-earth now, and more concerned about getting things working, and less about "design". And less

Re:About to be /.'ed

[Anonymous Coward]

This from a man who named an operating system after himself.

Wrong (and jealous?):

Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced by his own OS; he gave a working name of Linux (Linus' Minix); but thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to have it named Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate a Unix-like system).

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

Double check if you like, it's well-known history.

Re:About to be /.'ed

[Felix The Cat]

This from a man who named an operating system after himself.

Um, no (third paragraph).

Re:Hurd

[Chundra]

From the hurd page:

"The Hurd, together with the GNU Mach microkernel, the GNU C Library and the other GNU and non-GNU programs in the GNU system, provide a rather complete and usable operating system today. It is not ready for production use, as there are still many bugs and missing features. However, it should be a good base for further development and non-critical application usage.

The GNU system (also called GNU/Hurd) is completely self-contained (you can compile all parts of it using GNU itself). You can run several instances of the Hurd in parallel, and debug even critical servers in one Hurd instance with gdb running on another Hurd instance. You can run the X window system, applications that use it, and advanced server applications like the Apache webserver.

On the negative side, the support for character devices (like sound cards) and other hardware is mostly missing. Although the POSIX interface is provided, some additional interfaces like POSIX shared memory or semaphores are still under development."

I.e. it might be fun to play with, but it's not very useful for the average Joe.

Re:I've always liked Linus...

[Krafty Koder]

"Take web-browsers for example"

Or PHP for example - originally short for "personal home page" , it was a series of perl scripts for tracking who was looking at Ramus Lerdorf's online c.v.

Now its somehow morphed into something that runs millions of websites worldwide. If thats not a good example of Linus's "think small" philosophy, i dont know what is.

Re:Hurd

[Curtman]

Thanks for the warning. That will make me want to install it on my machine.

In contrast to Windows which will overwrite your bootloader, reorder partitions, and change partition types of existing partitions without you asking it to.. I don't think its fair to ridicule Hurd for warning you that it is possible to destroy data if you go out of your way to initialize a non-swap partition as a swap partition.

You can run mkswap in Linux on any partition regardless of weather it is set to "Linux swap" type or not. Somehow that hasn't been a huge problem for me either.