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Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough"
The Slashdolt writes "After a stern criticism from Linus, the long-time kernel hacker Alan Cox has decided to walk away as the maintainer of the TTY subsystem of the Linux Kernel, stating '...I've had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I've zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer
can send them to the new maintainer.'" A response to a subsequent post on the list makes it quite clear that he is serious.
Thanks for all the hard work. Good luck to the next maintainer. Not much else to say.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
QUIT!, Can't blame him.
Linus is brilliant. He is funny. Most days I really agree with anything he has to say.
However, he has butted heads with people in the past. Perhaps this is just human nature and unavoidable from time to time. Linus isn't perfect, nor always right. I thought he was really unfair to Con Kolivas when he drove Con away.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I wonder if I should prep my resume to step up for this, but then I realize my bear is nowhere near long enough.... 8)
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I'm curious about how projects, in general, fare after someone with rather intimate knowledge leaves for whatever reason. I'm not being specific to Linux; you gotta think some of the kernel developers of Windows have left over the years. That's gotta be hard on the next person regardless of project; "here's his code, all three million lines of it. Oh, he seemed to like Pascal syntax so he wrote all these macros to make his C++ code look like Pascal. Good luck!"
I see the tags 'butthurt' and 'whaaaaaaaaa', but no 'thanksforyourtime'. Why won't anyone show any gratitude for the years of work he's generously offered to the project?
WHY can't lkml.org's mailing list retriever handle a slashdotting?
Its not like the flashcrowds are all THAT big.
Test your net with Netalyzr
In before the Karma-Whores.
"stern criticism" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/373&hl=en&strip=1
"decided to walk away" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/375&hl=en&strip=1
"quite clear that he is serious" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/378&hl=en&strip=1
http://xkcd.com/323/
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Time for all to give Alan a sound round of applause and thanks! The TTY subsystem is a gem thanks to his work.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Please mod parent up
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
"stern criticism" -> link 1
"decided to walk away" -> link 2
"quite clear that he is serious" -> link 3
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
so much for a "benevolent dictatorship"
This could have been handled much better via a private message (or phone call) than in a public forum.
[Insert pithy quote here]
> Quite frankly, I don't understand why I should even have to bring these > issues up. You should have tried to fix the problem immediately, without > arguing against fixing the kernel. Without blaming user space. Without > making idiotic excuses for bad kernel behavior. > > The fact is, breaking regular user applications is simply not acceptable. > Trying to blame kernel breakage on the app being "buggy" is not ok. And > arguing for almost a week against fixing it - that's just crazy. I've been working on fixing it. I have spent a huge amount of time working on the tty stuff trying to gradually get it sane without breaking anything and fixing security holes along the way as they came up. I spent the past two evenings working on the tty regressions. However I've had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I've zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer can send them to the new maintainer. --- MAINTAINERS~ 2009-07-23 15:36:41.000000000 +0100 +++ MAINTAINERS 2009-07-28 20:09:32.200685827 +0100 @@ -5815,10 +5815,7 @@ S: Maintained TTY LAYER -P: Alan Cox -M: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk -S: Maintained -T: stgit http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~alan/ttydev/ +S: Unmaintained F: drivers/char/tty_* F: drivers/serial/serial_core.c F: include/linux/serial_core.h
I maintained an open-source project for several years. Open-source developers are jerks. They never accept it when their code just isn't going in. I know they're all smart and I get really good contributions, but sometimes you aren't meeting the need. The overwhelming majority of open-source developers I have encountered are just that: jerks.
Kriston
Alan Cox announces he will maintain Slashcode: "After this, it will be bloody easy to maintain the Slashcode codebase."
Here is a link to the start of thread that has not been slashdotted ... yet.
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=124870096801094&w=2
I have nothing to say but "LOL".
Yes, indeed it could have been. But unfortunately that's Linus' modus operandi and we all know from long experience that while a great programmer, his ego is far too big to allow him to apologize publicly in the same fashion in which he slammed Alan. Quite unfortunate really since both are quite talented individuals.
You can't expect to publicly berate people and have them bow to your every demand and not have it backfire on you at some point.
Where can we find another hacker that looks like a yeTTY?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
...about the details of this argument? I know Linus might not be the easiest person to work with, but he seems to make some sense here.
First of all I am very greatful for everything he did. I know he contributed a lot. Hope the handover will be more than this emotional message: "Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer care."
AKA: "The more people I meet, the more I like my dog."
STFU about slashdot bias.
It's good you never allowed windows network code into your company. You wouldn't want any open source BSD code in your company!
I mean, in the real world that I live & work in -- working on internal software projects...
It does not matter, how good a coder you are.
What matters is how well you "work with" the owner/manager, to address intangibles like "transitioning", "being a team player", "sticking to processes & best practices", "aligned with manager's priorities", "not being single-topic focussed", etc...
In the real world, there are the idea guys, who are invariably different from the implementation guys. Managers have no qualms with taking the idea-guy's idea, and asking someone else to implement it. Most of the time, this is because the idea guy's work ethic or reliability, is not up to snuff, in the estimation of the manager in charge.
Should I welcome the OSS world to the real-world?
Everyone serious uses BSD anyways :)
Alan, Linus, you both still rock in my book. Nearly every day for the past 13 years I have benefited from all you've done -- both personally and professionally. Squabbles happen, and it's not my place to judge -- cuz no matter what you've both given me a helluva lot more than I've given either of you.
Keep on kicking ass and taking names, however you are happy to do so.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Um, yeah I am going to just click on a link with an IP address. I like the previous poster's method that allows you to see the entire link even if it means I have to cut and paste.
Why is modding the truth considered "a troll". They are both acting like girls.
Alan thank you for your contribution to the open source community!
Overall I hope Alan finds a new project, I suspect that his experience could really help all sorts of userland code.
Coders are stubborn and dislike being told how to do anything. No shame in saying shove it when its time.
Storm
"You claim that emacs sh*ts itself when it gets EAGAIN, and you think
that's an emacs bug. And I think you're full of crap..."
I'm sure there's a job waiting in the diplomatic corps for Mr Torvalds...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
The true point of contention? Emacs vs. Vi. Loons.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
unlikely. see some of us don't see sex as the only thing worth living for. it's ok man, go back to watchin the game and drinking beer.
Linus: Hey Alan finger my tty
Alan: No Way! i quit!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The entire link still just points to an IP address...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Yeah, that's it - mod him flamebait! That'll make that awkward truth go away!
caring costs extra(sm)
It's okay, they're all Google cache links.
LOAD, LKLM, LOAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadeh! *breathes*
Gotta love the simplicity of Cox's message.
Unrelated Linkage
For the time in years he's really free! While you sit at home [... doing blah blah blah ...], he's going to go out, get drunk, and finally get some real pussy.
I rather doubt his wife would be too happy with that.
This is sad. Linus isn't getting enough sex, that must be why he acts very unprofessionally sometimes. Alan Cox, please come back, we really need you.
until it was slashdotted. Now Alan couldn't come back could he?
"!leavingkerneldevelopment"?
Alan is someone that should be thanked, but as far as I could tell from the list he just left TTY, not kernel development itself.
Then there is the whole thing where most browsers show link urls in the status bar (there are hover tricks that can be done in javascript, but Slashdot filters comments, so no worry here).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
132.155.125.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer px-in-f132.google.com.
That said, who wants to bet we can find a google cache of goatse?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer
care."
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
Linux is a great product, and that is the result of the magnificent work of all the coders and contributers. But sometimes they just act like children.
So has Theo, but things do seem to find a way of getting done.
Perhaps Alan can come over to the FreeBSD camp where we are a bit more friendly. He's a good guy and will compliment any project he latches onto.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As always.
The argument started when someone found the tty layer had a regression. Linus cares about regression deeply. His basic philosophy is old bug is better than new bug. If a fix introduces a new bug that breaks a real world application, then the fix should be reverted and a better fix should be worked out.
This ensures predictable behavior of an OS that you can actually rely on, and better release management.
Alan didn't think so. He thought his fix was too important to be backed out, although it introduced a regression. Linus was frustrated that he had to explain to Alan, a long time Linux hacker, about the rules. And that's where Alan got impatient too.
Wherever you end up. Your work on TTY has been quite useful. I must say though, my favorite work you have ever done must be the work on carrier pigeon protocol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
Regards
You can get the whole convo at the lkml mirror:
http://marc.info/?t=124870111900001&r=1&w=2
This mis-understanding would never have happened if they'd used Google Wave! :-P
A tested IQ of 151, and you think poor observation is related to intelligence?
It appears to me as well that Linus Torvalds makes sense.
But perhaps Alan Cox makes sense too - he knew the code well, and maybe there are opposite objectives(keeping userland working and keeping the tty subsystem bug-free) which cannot be reconciled.
When Alan Cox had realized that, he probably should have been hanging a red flag out and not commit the code to his published branches.
This is assuming/predicting that the other "nicer" patch Linus Torvalds talks about will have drawbacks, like interfering with other fixes. (I'm pulling this out of my magicians hat, to really be able understand the problem you need to be like three persons.)
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
What's Alan done for us lately anyway? /sarcasm
Just wondering.
He's married to himself?
> But sometimes they just act like children.
I wouldn't worry about it too much.
It's remarkable that the incident is so public.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Or you can just hover your mouse pointer over the link and see where it goes.
And BTW the paranoia level here is ridiculous.
You are talking in two tongues. First you say you're going to click on a link with an IP address; then you say you like the other copy/paste method.
But why would you trust a link with a domain name more??
Just use the previous poster's method!
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Seriously? KDESU is broken, in the first place.
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=kdesu
To be fair, "I no longer care" is shorthand for the closely related "I no longer care enough to put up with the criticism" which is just a statement of cost/benefit analysis. He does care, but not enough to keep going, and that roughly approximates "I don't care".
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I'll take the job!
If by "often", you mean "never".
you had me at #!
So Long and Thanks for all the Bits!
Drag and drop is quite convenient. It is also a security chasm. Once you can drag and drop one thing then you want to be able to drag and drop anything. In the case of arbitrary file formats not only must you implement code to check the incoming data stream (thus exposing yourself to all of the security considerations of "how many different ways can someone try to wax my process of checking the incoming data stream?") but you must consider that a data stream which is valid using one codec algorithm may cause a fault using another codec algorithm. Competing algorithms exist for many data format structures and the presumed same data format may have three or four codecs at use between X, the WM, a monolithic app like a web browser, and a devoted data editor (eg. GIMP), and even a devoted data viewer (eg. a multiformat display application). It isn't the simplest consideration.
With so much of the problem and criticism with the reigning proprietary OS being security related the open source community has tried to remain a little more focused on security related issues. Combine that with the difference in conceptual organization--F/OSS guys don't get paid to go to in house meetings together--and it is completely logical that something as "simple" as drag and drop is not implemented across largely unrelated application development groups.
Within a particular desktop environment using apps which were written specifically for that desktop environment (often referred to as a desktop suite) there is probably a more consistent end user experience.
It is the culmination of (years of) similar situations which has brought many rifts in major F/OSS development groups.
I find myself personally familiar with the situation which caused Alan to leave. The difference is that Alan has enough financial backing and social connections behind him that he likely will not end up living on the streets.
Can you imagine a headline,"Major developer sick and tired of political crap, leaves development group, will take up a section of cardboard on the sidewalk just down the block from Slashdot's HomelessinLaJolla"?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I'm surprised that the TTY subsystem is still in the kernel. By now, it ought to be in user space. It's rare today that a serial port is attached to an actual terminal (let alone a real Teletype), and separating the serial port driver from all the backspacing and line handling stuff would make both parts simpler. Most of the time, the TTY stuff in the kernel just gets in the way of other uses of serial ports.
They've been separated in QNX for a decade, for example.
1) Reiser 3 is quite mature
2) once R3 was complete and production-ready it made perfect sense for Hans to put his resources into the more interesting Reiser 4
3) why isn't Reiser 4 in the damn kernel already?
you had me at #!
It just takes one heroic mod to prevent casual users or Google searchers from having their time wasted. You can post as much drivel as you want, the Slashdot moderation system is much more effective than your tomfoolery. You're only seen by people who purposely browse at -1 for amusement or to hide you from others. See, you're already gone. Poof! And I make up for my small dick by spending part of my rather large salary on lots and lots of really high class hookers. Come on now, post more like you said - if you're lucky, it'll be seen by someone who isn't looking for it, not me though. Sorry.
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
Please talk to the moderators at Slashdot. I no longer care.
Beetle B.
that formatting sucked.
you had me at #!
Solaris :)
you had me at #!
Sorry, but i have to ask.
I'm a subscriber of the lkml. Yeah, i usually delete the msgs after 2 months.
Why cant i find a single of those messages in my own personal copy of the lkml group?
Was this in some kind of subgroup or what?
I know this is off-topic, but:
He wrangled himself an invitation to the White House for a beer.
This was his idea, suggested to Obama -- he's not going to apologize, but he says "we should all get together over a beer." He KNOWS that it will be really hard for Gates to proceed with the lawsuit without looking like a douchebag, after sitting down with him. This is a better non-apology apology than Obama's, from someone who really ought to be apologizing.
He got his union to pay for the trip.
He'll probably do very well on the right-wing travel circuit, because unlike Joe the non-plumber plumber, he is, in fact, a real cop.
So, basically, he was as much of an asshole as he ever was, he got the cops to all get together and sing the hymn about how he was a fine, upstanding asshole, and he probably keeps to get doing it, with everybody now KNOWING not to mess with him, or any other cop in Cambridge.
When I try to look at it from his purely personal, Machiavellian perspective, I'm not seeing the screwup yet.
Surely the TTY code isn't part of the serial driver subsystem? What the tty subsystem handles is line discipline, and that can be applied to any number of serial interfaces, both physical (serial ports) and virtual (sockets). If you talk to the serial port RAW there shouldn't be a line discipline involved.
(the issue of whether they're in the "kernel" or not is a separate issue, QNX being a microkernel being "in the kernel" there is kind of meaningless)
He probably still cares but doesnt really want to care and is trying to convince himself.......the end result will be that he doesnt care. He's thinking ahead...like all good programmers :)
If you wanna be a knight, act like one
After those 2 emails mentioned in the post he has posted various messages today (29th July) . I'm not so sure he has quit just yet,,,
http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/29/272
http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/29/290
"Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer care."
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
You know what I find entertaining? People who are smart enough to see through a fairly transparent dysfunctional coping mechanism, and then continue to let it bother them after they've encountered it for the nth time. "Hey, he really does care! He's *lying* to us..."
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I'm not surprised. Linus Torvalds comes across as a complete arse-hole (In that email at least).
you know what really gets on my nerves? when people claim people don't mean what they said based only on the fact that they said it.
the first sentance directs the person away. the second sentance acknowledges that the person was correct in asking him, as he was the person who used to care, but he no longer does...
you are an idiot.
"If Alan Cox wanted to work at Apple, it would take 1 phone call."
Especially if he wanted to work on the tty code.
-- Terry
... very common amongst programmers, especially excellent programmers. I can see both points of view, one (Linus) who wants to get this done as quickly as possible, machine-like, because he believes that the fix is quick and simple, the other (Alan) wants to dissect the problem, diagnose, understands it, and fix it. It's unfortunate that Alan made that decision, but I think Linus's last email was pushing him towards making it, he was clearly mad; that being said I have one thing to say, from a programmer's perspective: You cannot force a system programmer to think a certain way, do things the way you want them to do, not Alan Cox anyways. Linus's behavior is reminiscent of corporations who employ programmers to write functions (or sub-routines as some call them), all day long, "just do it, don't argue if it is right or wrong".
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
That he's a Cox shucker!!
those grapes were probably sour anyway.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Just remember, at some point we're all children...
I went to read the thread from around the message pointed by the article.
What I saw was a nervous breakdown from Mr. Cox because he had too much pressure on him and wasn't able to accept that his proposal was less optimal than that from others. See: http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/612
Mr. Cox finally comes to reason: http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/29/108
Considering the discussion going on from http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/29/276 , maybe Mr. Cox will reconsider.
I don't know about other issues, but I wouldn't be too fast to point the finger at Mr. Torvalds in this case.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
If everyone contributed as much of their time as you have, the (open-source) world would be a better place.
Thank you.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
"Linux is a great product, and that is the result of the magnificent work of all the coders and contributers. But sometimes they just act like children."
When used in this sense, it is equally valid to say that everyone on the planet acts like children. Really, it is the control freaks that are good at repressing their inner child that worry me the most. They come off as professional, work their way into positions of real power an authority, and then you discover how much they can _really_ screw things up for the rest of us.
I for one am reassured by Obama's stupid 'stupid' comment. Sure, it was stupid of him, but it convinces me he isn't going to do anything WW3 level stupid because he can no longer repress every natural aspect of his human nature.
Assuming what Linus said is true, about Alan blaming user land code for problems he was responsible for, then Alan was clearly in the wrong. However, Linus is wrong to have taken him to task in such a public forum. If he had any sense, he'd have done it privately, and Alan Cox would probably still be the maintainer. There's more to managing people than simply "being right".
To be fair, "I no longer care" is shorthand for the closely related "I no longer care enough to put up with the criticism" which is just a statement of cost/benefit analysis. He does care, but not enough to keep going, and that roughly approximates "I don't care".
I think you are right, I mean not exactly right, just roughly. You are basically not enough wrong to be wrong, just enough right to take your analysis almost seriously.
+1 Barking Mad?
In 2003 Alan cox stopped kernel development for a year whilst he learnt Welsh.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/759
It seems he left with little notice then (although he was maintaining the older kernel - 2.2) . Kernel development still continued in his absence....
I sometimes wonder if it's the very public nature of Linux (and much open source) development that gives that creates this impression of everyone acting like children. I've heard plenty of people describing working environments (no matter the expertise) that sound exactly the same as this, it's just that no one outside the company will ever see it. It's kind of a software development soap opera...
This just seem like a misunderstanding, what they really need is to talk it over a beer. President Obama is already busy with its own beers tomorrow, so we need to find another host ... any volunteer ?
Theo ? ...
RMS ?
Eric Raymond ?
When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
You know what I hate? People who get on soapboxes and criticize others when the criticism is obviously not valid.
Mr. Cox no longer cares about the TTY bugs; he still cares about being polite to those who address him. The statements are in no way contradictory.
Maybe he s just telling the truth, you know, like when one stop smoking or using MS products.
Also, he may keep on contributing.
And stop telling ppl they act like children when they do smth you don t approve, it s stupid
Thank you very much
That is another person with the name Alan Cox.
far more often than technical challenges. This incident provides an enlightening view into Linux development. Working for someone with the social skills of a 13 year old girl, who doesn't actually pay you, never ends well.
Back in 1938, a massive alien invasion took place in Grover's Mills, New Jersey -- during Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast about Martians. Maybe it wasn't a hoax? Applications were discovered for social security cards from a list of men with no backgrounds -- all named Cox:
Alan Cox
John Big Cox
Dewey Cox
Dixon Cox
Ima Cox
.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Why is modding the truth considered "a troll". They are both acting like girls.
I often see some very low-quality moderation but I don't think this is an example of it. I'll explain why the GP was trollish.
Perhaps because to say that is to dismiss the basis of the conflict, not by showing it to be invalid or by proposing a means of reconciliation but by trivializing it.
I'm a man so I have to use guesswork to answer another aspect of this question. I would guess that the above would look quite trollish to any woman who can conduct herself in a mature and intelligent fashion, due to the implication that the only reason why two men would have a conflict is because they resemble females. Although, I balance that with the knowledge that the intelligent women I have known all had one thing in common: they had more contempt for the petty/catty behavior exhibited by less-intelligent women than any man I have ever met, sometimes going so far as to say that they give all women a bad name by living up to stereotypes.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Not all Open Source developers are jerks. In fact, I would say the proportion is no worse than closed source.
In every thing, I would say the 'big names' often have a tendency to be a jerk at times (after all, a strong personality and great confidence plays no small role in typically becoming a 'big name', in programming or anything else for that matter).
In the case of submitting patches, it closed source world, the argument dies out and the rejected dev has no where to go. The code dies and the developer moves on (perhaps keeping the changes and looking for things to go horribly wrong to vindicate himself with the facts play out, not that *I've* ever done that . . . ). In open source, forks can happen. forks can be good (if both sides track and take what they want, both stay of quality and the community decides ultimate viability). However, in human nature such an act is kind of taken too personally more often than not. This is part of the reason open source in general is more flexible if you pick up a distribution and roll with it. It's got all the code complexity the community could give, united behind a cohesive vision that a distributor implements. Do any of them get everything right to me, no, but some get more right than others, which is more than I can say for the completely closed stacks.
I think in this case, Linus got carried away with initial cries of 'revert revert' without letting Alan work the problem for a reasonable time (3 days is way too soon to forcefully interject if you are truly delegating and trusting your delegation decisions). As soon as Alan pointed out the problem that was would be brought back by the revert, Linus probably should have conceded that it was worth it to invest more effort in getting it right, but it looks like it was too late and mood more than logic took over.
One thing I will say for Linus, is that some of the arguments I've seen him engage in he is the voice of practicality. I.e., sometimes a developer gets too wrapped up in their small world of code and loses touch with what is important for the end user. I think Linus has done a decent job of not falling into that trap (too easy to do), and his initial impression reflected that. It's just that Linus hadn't realized the point of the change in the first place and underestimated the value of it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Pascal is far easier to read than C (or C++).
C/C++ won because they cared not about humans but about the processor/hardware -- which led to faster programs (at run-time).
But Pascal was far faster to compile.
It was designed so it would be easier to understand and superb at compilation.
Wirth was simply a genius.
Just to be on-topic, Alan needed a rest, so perhaps he would stop anyway; Linus needs a vacation, too -- he's been working non-stop since ever; we can't really rely on just a few people...
I *absolutely* agree with you when it comes to many types of doors, especially public restroom doors -- why, in the devil's briefcase, do most public restrooms have doors that you have to pull when your hands are wet from washing them? Hygienically brain dead.
Anyway, various kinds of doors that open to the outside should not generally be push-out types. Consider residential doors opening to the outside, particularly in cold climates: if there is substantial snow on the ground, the occupants will be trapped inside. Even in not-so-cold climates, push-out doors to the outside can be too easily barricaded, again trapping people inside. Plus, as others have noted, such doors perforce have the hinges on the outside, allowing too easily for forced entry.
Meanwhile, public buildings usually have push-out doors mandated by local fire codes, for precisely the reasons you note -- but they generally also have awnings or some other means of ensuring that snow build-up does not block the doors from opening.
(NB: Posting anon for modding purposes.)
Cheers,
Alan's work on the IP stack at Swansea made linux the network ruling monster it is today. In some ways (multi-homed hosts with multiple default routes anyone?) the SUCS stack was superior to the current stack.
His work on the SCSI subsystem is also worthy of great respect.
Thanks for all your hard work, Alan, I hope you will keep coding forever!!!
That's because in most companies (and software projects in general), there are programmers who act like children (usually due to over sized egos). Most programmers aren't like this, but those who are tend to be the most visible.
Windows H/W support from my POV is abysmal, and that is even with MS' at-all-cost backward compatibility culture.
Didn't MS actually broke backwards compatibility with Vista, which is what pissed so many people off? They introduced a new driver system and expected hardware vendors to write to it. Many did, but legacy stuff isn't there.
This is my sig.
"+1 Barking Mad?" - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29, @07:09PM (#28875201)
WoW - I must have REALLY gotten to you @ some point, & with your own technical mistakes in some techno debate, which I'd guarantee you only brought on yourself no less, & totally did so, & you made yourself look like "$heet" here, is all I can figure, & this is your sick game of "pay back", lmao - 'enjoy it', lol!
(Also? Well - I really don't think you understand 1 thing - Face it: You can't "pi$$ on my parade" or "rattle me in MY game", & that's that - it's "TOO easy")...
BOITOM-LINE, is this:
I've been watching you "track me" for weeks now, posting replies as AC, & what w/ your constant "modding me down" via your registered sock puppet account(s) you use to do so... (& even your impersonating me as well in various postings also).
(AND, as-per-usual? Just more posting your wise-ass off topic replies as AC, after your registered account mod down of my posts quite frequently... others here see it as well)
LOL: Hey - right now? Well - I am TRYING to figure out your "end game" (which, it appears to myself thusfar, that you're trying to collect up as many "mod downs" as you can on me, which YOU often "administer" yourself no doubt) What a colossal WASTE of time, & your mod points, on your part - That won't help you much, considering I have way, Way, Way over 120++ or so by now (&, anyone can see your "points" are pure b.s. that's off-topic, every time).
Good luck w/ that, IF that's your "plan" here - I say that, simply because anyone can read the replies before & afterwards (relative to YOUR b.s. posts), & figure out your psychotic/sociopathic near constant stalking of myself, for almost a month or more here now. I have you bookmarked in a special folder in fact, if this is your "master plan"? LOL... so, that ought to be "good for a laugh", when it all "comes to a head"... & eventually? It will.
(Who do you think you are fooling?)
APK
P.S.=> 10 steps ahead of you, everytime... you would be a LOUSY "Field General" or Chess Player imo @ least... you're VERY predictable, obvious, & always, off topic! apk
Linus' responsibilities require him to be very strict. If he wasn't so hard-nosed about regressions and code quality, Linux wouldn't be where it is today. Unfortunately, he's also a jerk (or "git" if you'd rather). I've worked with similar people, and they make you want to pull your hair out. There is no excuse for Linus to be so inconsiderate. Alan has contributed an enourmous amount of work to Linux, and the least Linus could do is show him a little courtesy when conversing with him.
I'm tired of that silly myth.
I guess that explains why you didn't stop to extract the grain of truth in your pique of ennui.
Bonhomie is greatly increased in collaborations where little harm results from momentary lapses or honest mistakes. Software security is not one of those things. Likewise, deep sea divers are notorious for having a short fuse over charging a cylinder with the wrong gas at the wrong pressure. That kind of thing.
Personally, I'd like to dig up some tape recordings of the choice language involved while setting the pilings that resulted in the Pont du Gard standing for 2000 years.
Reminds me of a joke I came across in a relatively lame joke book in someone's basement.
A women overhears some offensive language from two linemen working at the top of a telephone pole in front of her yard. She calls up the foreman at the power company and complains about the foul language. The supervisor contacts the two work men and demands an explanation. Joe explains: "Me and John were working up on this pole. He was up above me soldering some wires and dribbled some solder down the back of my shirt. So I yelled up 'Hey John, could you be a bit more careful up there'".
I've encountered a couple of civility-at-all-cost programmers in my day. The kind of guy who would ring you up from behind half a cement wall in downtown Mogadishu and go "hey, I didn't want to interrupt anyone but we're having a spot of trouble here ... oh, the commander is taking lunch ... no problem I'll call you back later". Needless to say, we didn't hit many deadlines.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on TED talks about achieving flow states. He says a person enters a flow state in a situation when both challenge and skill are way above average (relative to the norms of that person), but the skill available is known to be sufficient to the challenge, even if the challenge is very high.
When I get deep into the top-right quadrant I don't have much patience with elementary errors, such a failing to free a pointer allocation, or a buffer overflow caused by misuse of the abysmal C string functions. If your standards are high, it's not that difficult to train yourself not to make this kind of mistake. In some ways I find the STL more difficult to achieve 100% correctness, since I can't keep Scott Meyer's oeuvre in my forebrain all at once.
How many buffer overflows are committed by people who are tying spongy ropes to their ankles and jumping off bridges? Is that figure elevation or altitude? Whatever. Let's just tie it and jump. That's how many people code. There's absolutely nothing about the terrible C string API more difficult than converting meters to feet, altitude to elevation, etc. The extra hoop is ominous and darned annoying, but it doesn't take a PhD to work it out correctly.
On some levels, there's not nearly enough brittleness among programmers. More brittleness among the community might have put the C string/buffer functions out of their misery twenty years ago.
When I'm deep in my flow quadrant, I truly resent the 1% of my brain allocated to safeguarding myself against abuse of the C language clstrfck() API. And I resent the other 500 paper cuts in the typical OS/programming language that confine my increasingly rare flights of inspiration to a depressingly paltry low-earth orbit. (And let's not kid ourselves that Java brings much to the table in the inspiration department. A flight of inspiration under a hermetic dome is not the life experience I'm seeking here.)
In "Man Without a Country" Vonnegut wills himself the following epitaph: "The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music".
He also says "What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn't be so mad at them."
If some day I arrive at a flow state where Art of the Fugue pours out of my keyboard, the very notion of palhood will lapse from my psyche, as will any concern I might otherwise feel for the emotional states of thin-skinned beer drinking leprechauns. Music first, pals second.
Maybe President Obama will invite Linus and Alan over for a beer.
As a woman, I find that an insulting and sexist thing to say. We women don't sit around and say things like, "Come on, ladies, this arguing is stupid and pointless. Stop acting like men!" Though judging from the fact that this is what happened here and from the content of your comments, I guess we should start.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
No disgust . . . my backside.
>Cox -> submits code which apparently caused a bug
>User -> Reports breakage
>Cox -> Can't replicate breakage and asks user for debug info so he can fix it.
>User -> Says they don't know what to debug for, but is willing to work with Cox.
Here they have found the bottom issue: emacs was expecting some reasonable behavior from the kernel: data delivery before notification of producer's termination. The behavior was broken.
>Linus -> Jumps in and calls Cox's code a buggy piece of shit before any debugging took place, and before it is established if the code is buggy or not.
Hello? The code broke a reasonable expectations of its users. Not buggy? That's technically is a DEFINITION of a bug.
>Cox -> Continues to troubleshoot the issue.
>Linus -> Flames Cox personally and says Cox is unwilling to work on the issue.
Cox was proposing some strange solutions.
>Cox -> Takes his ball and goes home, except in this case, it is OSS so he doesn't really take any ball with him. He just leaves.
Then they had a technical discussion, and it appeared that Linus was right.
And Linus, maintainer hatred is a disease.
Happy retirement Mr. Cox, my guess is that you deserve it more than anyone. Thanks for all the hard work, you may just have saved us all, and one day in the future, when we are all free, I, for one, will think of you.
Women have plenty of collective generalisations about men....
Like him or not, Linus is still the main() in linux kernel development circles, and for good reason.
(not as Finnished as the Spannish main, love, but the whole ocean...I'll shutup)
We women don't sit around and say things like, "Come on, ladies, this arguing is stupid and pointless. Stop acting like men!"
Probably not, but at the same time there's much less social stigma attached to a woman acting in a masculine manner, so it's a pretty pointless comparison.
Though judging from the fact that this is what happened here and from the content of your comments, I guess we should start.
So basically, if I want to be sexist too, all the justification I need is to have listened to Rosie O'Donnell for five minutes. Gotcha.
Correct? Yes
Seek help from a mental health care professional. Your posts have a rambling quality and an air of paranoia which does not seem healthy.
Perhaps he was dictating?
Here's my theory....
I get paid WAY too much to just shut up and do stupid stuff. If they wanted someone who would just shut up they could find someone much cheaper.
So if my boss (or her boss, or her boss's boss) tells me to do something I think is stupid, I do my best to explain to them exactly what is wrong with that plan.
So I'll argue about it. I'll disagree with them. I'll be difficult. But the whole time I'm telling them I'm just being difficult because I think it's a bad plan, not because it's personal.
And there may be some reason I don't see that it's actually the right answer.
In any case, once I'm sure they've gotten the concept I'm trying to express, I let them decide - them being the boss - and I go do what they said. Sometimes they change their mind. Sometimes they tell me the reason it's the right answer. Occasionally they tell me that they agree, but their boss says do it.
Always fight the stupidity. Don't take the fight personally - but if you're in technology, the fight is part of your job.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Note that sometimes there is a good reason for pulling doors to get out: if the door opens on a frenquently circulated area then pushing it to get out might generate accidents.
I worked with Alan a long time ago. Never quite understood how he could cope with a shimmering wallpaper.
Anyway, the biggest compliment I've ever had was when he said my code was "fixable".
Sadly at the time I didn't know him from a bar of soap. Only that he locked out all out customers fixing an intentional spelling mistake in my code ;)
First we had "All your base are belong to us", and now this beaut: "Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer
care.". I love it. In so many levels this can be interpreted.
Who's first to make this your new sig?
What it often means is "I do care, deeply, and it is hurting me, so I am trying to stop".
And by firewalls, I mean secretaries, or at least someone to check and occasionally massage quite abrasive and personalizing correspondence. It's very simple: Linus was right. He had reason to be pissed. But Cox is important. ANYONE who knows who Cox is would have looked at Linus's letter and saw immediately that it needed some small changes, if nothing else to let Cox save face.
The problem is made even worse by drugs that leave important academic users super-focused (not saying Linus is on any) -- the more clearly you see "idiocy" the more important it is to have a firewall take out words like that.
Actually, Linus's e-mail includes the word "idiotic" explicitly.
I doubt what I'm saying will have many takers around here, but posting at +2 in case anyone has any interesting responses for me.
"Seek help from a mental health care professional. Your posts have a rambling quality and an air of paranoia which does not seem healthy" - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30, @01:49AM (#28878005)
Care to show us your PHD in Psychiatry, along w/ your license to practice, & your formal analysis of my mental state? Oh, that's right - YOU don't have any of those, now do you? It's also not my fault you forgot to take your meds for dyslexia or that you have ADD/ADHD, & because of that, you are unable to read the written word, Hooked on phonics might be the answer for you.
APK
Linus is not Alan's boss and does not have the right, specifically, to ask these sorts of "why didn't you do your job" questions. We can see how productive those questions are, when you aren't signing the paychque of the person you're asking.
Way to get to the bottom of things, Linus!
Jesus Christ. This is exactly the attitude that splinters the OSS community - and it's a core philosophy of its central man. It needs to stop. Can't we all get along, resolve our differences and collaboratively create fantastic software? No, instead, we have to have petty arguments and fork and end up with mediocre rubbish. Why are there hundreds of distros that nobody uses, instead of one that seriously challenges Windows/MacOS?
If there's one thing certain in technology, it's that different people will have different opinions. This needs to be a source of innovation and quality, not friction. As engineers we need to find better ways to solve these interpersonal problems, than resorting to ego, insults, disrespect, intolerance, argument and he-said/she-said bullshit.
-- "Fine! I'll go get my own lunar lander. With blackjack... aaaand hookers. In fact, forget the lunar lander and the blackjack. Ah, screw the whole thing." - Bender
True, but that's sexist as well. And just because the GP is a woman, we can't necessarily conclude that she, too, holds the same generalizations (at least until she displays them, then we can yell at her for being hypocritical and whatnot.)
That's because it's better to behave like a man than a woman. So saying "stop behaving like a man" would be a complement to a woman. That's why women are always copying men. They know men are better, and they want to emulate that. Can't blame them for trying. But since women are inferior, they generally fail to emulate men successfully and come off as noisy, pointless, butch blobs. Unless they are emulating useless girly-men who, being useless as men, are about average for women. But I have to ask, "what's the point?". But then, being a man, I can understand the pointlessness of it all. Women can't I guess, because they don't have the perceptive powers. In women's minds it's all fluffy teddy bears and singing blue and pink elephants dancing in circles in the air playing trumpets and fluttering their coiffured eyebrows. Oh, to live in la la land. The unreality of everything, the escape, the estrogen.
What I find interesting from a psychological perspective is the baseless optimism of the participants.
Do they think that in 1979 (or some specific date since) that Bill Gates stroked an imaginary 'Snidely Whiplash' mustachio and cackled over how he'd dominate the computer market and exploit people for his own wealth?
Do they really think that any corporate/government organization that represents the polar opposite to the Linux 'paradigm' - highly bureaucratic, stifling, top-down organizations - didn't START with a font of goodwill, like Linux?
What, precisely, did they think made their effort unique? Why did they actually think that Linux, as it becomes more relevant, wouldn't ALSO become a balkanized playground of ego, power, and territory-marking?
How many distros of Linux are there? And how many of them have forums filled with not just people who are talking about the postive aspects of this distro or that, but who display the fanboi-attack piranha behavior toward anyone that dares preferentially support some other distro?
Hey, I congratulate the guy for putting up with it as long as he did. He made a valiant effort, regardless of its futility.
But as far as what he was fighting? Q.E.D.
-Styopa
In reading the Linux kernel thread devoted to this emotional outburst of frustration amongst the Linux kernel developers, it quickly becomes apparent that neither Linus, nor Alan, have clear understandings of what exactly is going on in the kernel with the stated bugs. Indeed, neither of them seem to be working of a set of interaction diagrams, or other architectural diagrams. Both of these guys are just lost in the code and angry with each other.
On Fri, 24 Jul 2009, Alan Cox wrote: ...
> On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:21:45 +0200
> "Rafael J. Wysocki" wrote:
> >
> > Well, I thought we were expected to avoid breaking existing user space, even
> > if that were buggy etc.
>
> I don't know where you got that idea from. Avoiding breaking user space
> unneccessarily is good but if its buggy you often can't do anything about
> it.
Alan, he got that idea from me.
We don't do regressions. If user space depended on old behavior, we don't ...
change behavior.
Linus
---------------------
I think this is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding...
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I agree and concur. People like this also tend to pick at words like loose strings in a garment. You damn well KNOW you understood the meaning. Use your context clues and move on.
It makes me wish we could communicate via thought. Of course, they would probably just start criticizing which thoughts you chose to transmit.
What if Linus took a phone call directly to Alan to discuss it instead of sending that "This is CRAZY! Why do you ...? WHY, WHY, WHY?" email that seems to be the final drop that made Alan decide to drop it.
I know -- that's not how you normally work, besides most of them stick to mail-only. However, I bet it could have solved their misunderstandings with a possibly other outcome. Anyway, it's history now... we move on.
Honestly, it's Alan's right to walk away, and it's Linus' prerogative to make whatever observations he'd like to. I don't see the drama, or why people are so exercised about it.
To be fair, "I no longer care"
To be even fairer, "I no longer care" is an emotional anagram for "and not only that, fuck off"
well women certainly do...
Your doing it for free you idiot! H HA AHA HA AHA AH AHA AH
Free means your only gonna go until "REALITY BITES"
I have a Hauppauge WINTV HVR 1600 digital TV tuner card running on a Windows 7 RC x64 box with 6 GB of memory. Works fine in GBPVR. I did however have issues getting the onboard RAID controller working, but thats another story.
Sua TTY esta en Argentina.
Maybe he can go back and improve AberMUD again?
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
The most interesting point is missing from the article quote: a patch was provided by Alan Cox to commit his decision:
--- MAINTAINERS~ 2009-07-23 15:36:41.000000000 +0100
+++ MAINTAINERS 2009-07-28 20:09:32.200685827 +0100
@@ -5815,10 +5815,7 @@
S: Maintained
TTY LAYER
-P: Alan Cox
-M: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
-S: Maintained
-T: stgit http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~alan/ttydev/
+S: Unmaintained
F: drivers/char/tty_*
F: drivers/serial/serial_core.c
F: include/linux/serial_core.h
It is pretty explicit, maybe more than words.
It's a sad that such conflicts happen, but its usual in larger projects.
Sometimes the LKML and Linus especially lack the delicatness to say things,
even if they may be right, saying things in a way that do not offend people
is often the best way to keep their attention and motivate them going toward
the direction wished.
Let's hope Alan will continue its work on other areas for the benefits of the community.
Linus : You're a brat and and an asshole.
Please grow up (that includes stopping doing 13yr old jokes like talking like a pirate).
So, in essence, Alan yet again shows his ass, Linus *finally* gets tired of Alan's arrogance and smacks him, whereupon Alan acts like the typical six-year-old and walks away in a huff.
Suck it up, Alan, and grow up. Linus is right and you are wrong, and you got pissed off because someone bigger than you finally stood up and told you that you were wrong. Intellectual maturity and emotional maturity obviously don't go hand-in-hand.
Also, doors should be always pulled when you go in and pushed when you go out. That makes exiting the building easier in case of emergency (people don't rush to the door and jam it, preventing anyone from pulling it open.) and also when people are trying to get in and out at the same time, the person outside is more capable of keeping the door open for the person going out (it is better that people first get out, before new people get in, because inside there is a limited space, while outside contains usually a lot more room). Also outside usually contains more room for pulling, while the inside often has a wall that limits the space for pulling, especially if you want to keep the door open for someone else.
Nah, door shouldn't "be always pulled when you go in and pushed when you go out".
In many countries such as the Scandinavian countries and also Canada, that's a bad design due to snow. Also, having a door open outwards is a risk to people walking past the door should it be opened right in their path.
So - not wanting to start a huge debate over this, this simple example proves the problem any design decission has (also Linux): there are often more diverse circumstances to cater for than there are possible standards.
PS: never bothered to answer a post before, so I skipped creating an account for this one time
I did the Gentoo thing for a few years until I got sick of being abused on the forums and chat rooms. The reality is that open source is a social endeavor. For some it's about showing everyone else how smart you are, but for the rest of us it's about working together with people who are intelligent, friendly, and fun to be with. If you are at a party and you come across a rude and offensive person, you turn away and find another group to chat with. I don't know Linus, and the only thing I've seen is that Google talk he gave on git, but if he's like that in real life, and if Linux was a dinner party, the only people standing beside Linus would be the ones who want to be seen with Linus.
USB? I thought we were talking about TTY here.