Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug

Arsehole by GrahamCox · 2012-12-28 14:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

Winning friends and influencing people since 1983.

Seriously, who'd put up with this crap? There are nicer ways to make ones way through life.

Re:Arsehole by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-28 14:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

I wish my boss would show the same concern for the quality of our software, and scream at the programmers that break it every day. Unfortunately it doesn't happen, and other programmers end up fixing the broken code (and quietly grumbling) because otherwise they would not be able to do their jobs.
Sometimes harsh words can send a message better than a general "please check your code before you commit".
Re:Arsehole by fredprado · 2012-12-28 14:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

He isn't trying to make friends. He is trying to manage the efforts to implement a particularly complex piece of software, whilst hearing bullshit from one of his developers who made a very big mistake.

Everybody makes mistakes, but the right posture when it was obviously your fault is to take the blame and learn from them, not to try and make excuses.
Re:Arsehole by jjohnson · 2012-12-28 14:30 · Score: 5, Insightful

Of course, neither harsh words nor general "please check" encomiums are as good as calmly, straightforwardly stating "we do it this specific way, you did it that way instead, as a result we have this undesirable result. Do it again, correctly. In the future, check X, Y and Z to ensure that you don't repeat this mistake."
Only in the socially retarded world of /. is this sort of behaviour lauded because the best behaviour that I described above seems too goddamned difficult to manage.

--
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Re:Arsehole by phantomfive · 2012-12-28 14:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think the point is, Linus would rather the guy not do any work than to continue to produce such garbage code. He would rather make every change himself, than to rely on fellow-programmers who will only make things worse.

And that's understandable. Bad programmers will cost you more time than they save.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Arsehole by amiga3D · 2012-12-28 14:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

While I agree somewhat with what you say I have to say that sometimes it is necessary to chew people out. I don't know what the situation is or the personality of the maintainer but people are different. What works with some doesn't with others. I have supervised people in a maintenance environment and while some just needed to be told what to do and let them run with it there were others that had to be kickstarted. Some people do actually benefit from a good ass chewing.
Re:Arsehole by Hal_Porter · 2012-12-28 14:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

How technical do I need to be before I can get away with telling people to "SHUT THE FUCK UP!". Script monkey? OS Kernel developer?
Actually it has nothing to do with technical ability. You can tell people to shut the fuck up if you're not in a position to get fired when your boss finds out. I.e. you own the company or, like Linus, you are Benevolent Dictator For Life on some open source project.
Of course - as Ulrich Drepper found out - even Benevolent Dictators For Life can look out of the window and see that the peasants are tearing down their statues, Ceausescu style. And most people reading this would get shitcanned from their sysadmin job a lot quicker than that for not jumping when their boss tells them.
Really the tech world would be a lot more pleasant if people didn't conflate rudeness and technical competence. Most people seem to master the rudeness, neglect the technical competence and then wonder why they are undervalued.

--
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Re:Arsehole by TrekkieGod · 2012-12-28 14:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

He isn't trying to make friends. He is trying to manage the efforts to implement a particularly complex piece of software, whilst hearing bullshit from one of his developers who made a very big mistake. Everybody makes mistakes, but the right posture when it was obviously your fault is to take the blame and learn from them, not to try and make excuses.
You can't fix unprofessionalism by being unprofessional. Linus's response is uncalled for, and if anyone I work for ever tells me to shut the fuck up, he can start looking for my replacement, and won't ever need to hear me speak up again.
I agree with Linus's reasoning for why it's really a kernel bug, not a pulseaudio bug. The correct way of handling this would be to simply say, "you need to own up to this thing, because it's our policy that any kernel changes that breaks userspace applications is our problem. Fix this now." If for some reason this is a constant issue with the guy, than you remove him from that role as maintainer, but based on the lkml thread and the responses from Mauro, it seems Mauro had good reason to believe some things would remain broken after reverting the changes to the kernel, so he was just trying to understand the problem better. He behaved professionally, calmly explaining his position and agreeing with Linus about his mistake, on the face of having an adult throwing a tamper tantrum at him. Kudos to his patience, I don't share it. You simply could not pay me enough to work with someone who very publicly disrespected me in the way Linus did with him.

--
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Re:Arsehole by MacGyver2210 · 2012-12-28 14:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

I would happily put up with that and more just for the credit of being one of the select few who get to work on the kernel. To have the ear of the man(or team) that gets to decide the direction it goes for the future.
I guarantee you I'd never make that same mistake again. I'm sure if he hadn't tried to blame the user Linus would have been a little nicer about it.

--
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Re:Arsehole by BasilBrush · 2012-12-28 15:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think the point is, Linus would rather the guy not do any work than to continue to produce such garbage code. He would rather make every change himself, than to rely on fellow-programmers who will only make things worse.
There's a term for people with attitudes like this; who express them by public tantrums: A Prima Donna.
Re:Arsehole by Austerity+Empowers · 2012-12-28 15:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

His attitude is bullshit, his intent is not.
That said, it's really not clear why this was on a kernel dev mailing list and not in 1:1 emails. One would hope this sort of public thrashing is the last result of frustrated people.
Re:Arsehole by phantomfive · 2012-12-28 15:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

There's a term for people with attitudes like this; who express them by public tantrums: A Prima Donna.
Linus isn't a Prima Donna. A Prima Donna is someone who wants to draw attention to herself. Linus is not like that, he's perfectly willing to stay in the background and write code.

However, he doesn't tolerate incompetence or idiots; his flaw is not knowing how to communicate that in a polite way, and being a bit hasty to judge. Which is different than a prima donna.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Arsehole by phantomfive · 2012-12-28 15:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

That said, it's really not clear why this was on a kernel dev mailing list and not in 1:1 emails.

So that anyone else who thinks of making a similar mistake will think twice.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Arsehole by jamesh · 2012-12-28 15:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think the point is, Linus would rather the guy not do any work than to continue to produce such garbage code. He would rather make every change himself, than to rely on fellow-programmers who will only make things worse.
There's a term for people with attitudes like this; who express them by public tantrums: A Prima Donna.
Ok, I'll bite: How is an email in a private mailing list a "public tantrum"?
LKML is hardly a "private mailing list", given that anyone can read it, and anyone can subscribe to it. There's even a link to a public archive in TFS.
Re:Arsehole by QuietLagoon · 2012-12-28 15:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

I wish my boss would show the same concern for the quality of our software, and scream at the programmers that break it every day. Unfortunately it doesn't happen...
Sure, it does happen. I have fired programmers who could not do their job. The firing was done in my office with the door closed. I did not post news of the firing on the internal company forums. I did not drag the body through the streets as an example.
.
Why do you rationalize poor management techniques as an excuse for poor management?
Re:Arsehole by Kneo24 · 2012-12-28 15:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

No level of "professionalism" will make most people understand how badly they screwed up when they screwed up badly. I have personally tried the professional route numerous times, only for the message to not get across. At that point your subordinates think you're a push over and that the problem wasn't that serious. Do what Linus did here when it's important and only when its important and you will accomplish two things. The first of course is getting your point across clearly. The second is that you don't tolerate any BS when someone has clearly screwed up.
Re:Arsehole by haruchai · 2012-12-28 15:56 · Score: 4, Insightful

And his attitude isn't that unusual for men in charge. Gates has done it as has Jobs and Ballmer.

--
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Re:Arsehole by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-28 15:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

No, don't confuse narcissism for good management. Not the same.
Re:Arsehole by phantomfive · 2012-12-28 16:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

And his attitude isn't that unusual for men in charge. Gates has done it as has Jobs and Ballmer.
Yeah, actually.

And getting it right is surprisingly difficult. His primary goal is to communicate, "you did something incredibly stupid, and are in danger of getting kicked out of the team."

How do you communicate something like that without sounding rude? It is possible, and if you can do it then you might have a future as a diplomat, but not many people can do it. Developing those skills while simultaneously developing the skills to be a kernel programming lead is not very common.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Arsehole by dbIII · 2012-12-28 16:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

Sometimes polite doesn't work. You don't tell a welder that their weld is just not quite right and to please do it again if it's not too much trouble. You tell them it's fucked and to grind it out and do it again before everything falls down and kills someone. That's an extreme case, but it's still a good example to show that polite doesn't always get a message across.
From the summary it appears to be at the end of a string of failed communication, in which case being blunt can be very appropriate.
Re:Arsehole by phantomfive · 2012-12-28 16:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yeah, and in this case, Mauro was already looking bad, he had embarrassed himself badly by making a technical mistake and trying to justify it, and Linus was telling him to shape up.

A hockey analogy would be if your teammate took a shot at his own goal, then tried to blame someone else, are you going to talk to him nicely or are you going to punch him in the face and tell him to cut it out?

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Arsehole by AuMatar · 2012-12-28 16:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

Bullshit. If someone is fucking up (especially repeatedly), the boss should talk to him. Not scream at him- talk in a professional manner. Or let him go, if the mistakes are bad enough. You do not disrespect your employees by screaming them- it solves nothing, causes workplace friction, lowers morale of both the one being screamed at, the one screaming, and their coworkers. Its counterproductive.
If my boss came to my office and calmly told me I fucked up, I'd immediately jump on the problem and fix it. If my boss came in screaming at me, I'd tell him to get the fuck out, send an email to HR detailing his unacceptable behavior causing a hostile work environment and go home- telling him I'd return upon getting a sincere apology, and that I would expect full pay for every day in the interim. Oh, and my resumes would be on the net that evening. If he really pissed me off I'd go to his boss and tell him its me or him and I want a decision by the end of the day. There is no excuse for not behaving like an adult in the workplace.

--
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Re:Arsehole by jhoegl · 2012-12-28 17:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

I find it odd that you guys are lashing out at Linus.
First off this is Linus's project, his name on this project, and a bug that would not look well for his project.
Secondly the programmer in question screwed up, and instead of admitting it and asking for help, he blames others. (read, programmer has a big ego)
Linus called him out on it, and the programmer should take it, because the programmer caused the issues.

In short, this whole thing happened because of the programmer, not Linus.
Re:Arsehole by tftp · 2012-12-28 17:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

You don't tell a welder that their weld is just not quite right and to please do it again if it's not too much trouble. You tell them it's fucked and to grind it out and do it again before everything falls down and kills someone.
I'm not sure how you manage your welders, but I would go about like this:
"Bill, this bead is too shallow. It won't bear the load. The bottom of the weld is cold, and there is no metal there. You will have to grind it out and redo. This weld will be inspected with X-ray to make sure you do it right this time. We will have to pay you overtime, by law, for this. But if you do it again there will be no overtime - you will get your final check instead. The reason is that if these welds fail someone will be killed. It is that important. Please do your best."
This explains the problem, explains what to do to correct, and also spells out the consequences for continued bad work. It ends with an encouragement; you never want to end the conversation with a threat. But the overall content of the message is exactly the same as yours, and the welder will not feel offended. He will feel ashamed of his poor work. It won't make him happy, but by the end of the day he will know that I was right - actually, as soon as he grinds his superficial bead away and exposes the unwelded groove.
And if in my opinion the guy is hopeless I will simply summon HR to have him dismissed right away. There is no need to offend him by telling him that he is an idiot. He may well be, but it's not in my interest to infuriate people. I simply don't have a use of him anymore. Nothing personal.
In that aspect, try to not enrage your welders when you chew them up at a height of 100 storeys. It's a long fall to the ground, and people do see red when they are angry.
Re:Arsehole by fredprado · 2012-12-28 18:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

And then Bill comes and says:

"It is not my fault boss, the beads are totally fine, the fault is that they shouldn't be putting the load where they always did, and where it worked before, they should put the load now in this nice little place I arbitrarily chose. Anywhere else the thing will fall apart, but it is their fault."
Re:Arsehole by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-28 18:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

Gawd, it's not difficult:
"I reviewed your patch and I'm not satisfied with it as it breaks userland applications. It is our policy to avoid doing this. I also noticed that your patch returns incorrect error codes, which we also should not do as it can break other applications. Thus, the patch is rejected pending a fixup which corrects these issues. Please take this seriously, as it takes time to review these patches and when we release even beta patches with these types of issues it reflects badly on linux as a whole.
I am certain you'll resolve this issue quickly and that you wish to remain a member in good standing."
Serious, professional, and simple. No bullshit. No swearing. And most importantly--nothing personal. It's not hard. I literally just wrote that on the fly. I'm not a manager, just a lowly sysadmin with a bad attitude who prefers not to get fired and knows when to keep his tongue in his cheek and STILL get what he wants. Yes, there's a white lie at the end, because I think Linus truly believes this dude is worthless, but it softens the blow and keeps everyone reasonably happy.
Re:Arsehole by Excelcia · 2012-12-28 18:53 · Score: 3, Insightful

No. This isn't because Linus can't fire him. This wasn't Linus carefully picking his words to get his point across. This was an out of control rant and his explanations about that being his style are ones I do not accept as valid. They seem to be nothing more than excuses for a criminal lack of self discipline.
Mr. Chehab is either competent and made a mistake, or he is not competent and this is chronic. In the latter case, I can understand frustration, but this is exactly what self discipline is for. Because even if it was total incompetence, anger is not ever a valid response to incompetency. I bolded that because it's important. It's never appropriate in response to incompetence. Never. Not by anybody. Regardless of your self-professed management style. Regardless of the stakes. It is a failure of one's personal self discipline, and it is always... always self defeating.
Anger is a proper response in the face of willfulness or maliciousness. And looking at the thread, and in reading quite a number of other threads involving Mr. Chehab, it is clear that he was being neither willful nor malicious. Anger is part of the "fight or flight". It's an adjunct to combat, and the words Linus used were clearly combative. Combat is a response to combat - otherwise you are being an aggressor. In other words, Linus was being nothing more than a schoolyard bully picking on someone for no better reason than he could. It's that simple.
You can be stern, uncompromising, and even lay out consequences for ongoing failure without the anger and get the point across just as well. Here is how Linus' letter should have read:

Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio.
Mauro, this sounds like excuse-making.
It's a bug alright - in the kernel. You've been a kernel maintainer too long to not know that the first rule of kernel maintenance is that if a change results in user programs breaking then it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. Don't do that again.
To make matters worse, the entire commit (f0ed2ce840b3) is substandard. You know that ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way that ENOENT would ever be valid.

So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious bugs and/or regressions.
I don't want to see this sort of excuse-making from a kernel maintainer again.
I'm going to apply Rafael's patch directly myself. My taking time and effort to apply fixes directly for problems you've introduced means your work has reduced overall efficiency. Make sure that doesn't happen again.
Seriously.
WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!
I'm frustrated because your whole email was wrong, and the patch that broke things was substandard. The fact that you seem to try to make *excuses* for breaking user space and blame some external program that *used* to work, is just not how we work.
A Better Linus
Re:Arsehole by whois · 2012-12-28 19:01 · Score: 3, Insightful

I self censor my emails all the time. You wouldn't believe how many long diatribes I've thrown away. How many heart felt impassioned speeches I've given up on as offensive or too harsh. I guess in some ways it makes the harsh emails I do send that much more potent. The point I'm trying to make is that it must take a special kind of person to stand up in front of more than 100,000 people and say "you're a moron, shut up!"
He either realizes that this would cause a big fallout where his statement would be examined in detail by everyone on the mailing list + everyone on slashdot and a few other communities and just doesn't care; or he somehow hits the send button without ever realizing the consequences.
I think it's the former, and despite his outburst he's still managed to steer the Linux community through 20 years of massive evolutionary changes in computing. It seems that even with armchair analysts saying he could get the job done without yelling, maybe should attempt the same thing, building a peaceful community of kernel hackers with no tyrant at the top and figure out a way to measure productivity, code quality and other metrics.
Re:Arsehole by phantomfive · 2012-12-28 19:20 · Score: 3, Insightful

Strangely, your method would make me want to punch you in the face more than what Linux wrote.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

not good management technique by mbkennel · 2012-12-28 14:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's just a kernel patch, nothing to be actually "angry" about. Why so emotional? And especially when it's somebody who is not an employee.

Just say, "It is our firm policy that we do not break XXX, even when any given developer wishes they could. If you wish to continue contributing, you must follow the policy. Please apply the fix ASAP and acknowledge your understanding of these conditions."

Re:not good management technique by fredprado · 2012-12-28 14:11 · Score: 4, Insightful

Because the guy screwed up and tried to make excuses. At his position Linus does not have to put with childish behavior from his staff, he can choose who works with him.
Re:not good management technique by mbkennel · 2012-12-28 14:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

"At his position Linus does not have to put with childish behavior from his staff"
a) it wasn't his staff, it was somebody from Redhat. And even if it were....
b) Linus was the only childish one getting all pantytied and emotional.
Did you read the rest of the thread? And how the other people responded?
It seems to be a complicated issue. The other people acknowledged the bug but showed it in context of some rather difficult hardware & driver issues across multiple areas.

Can we... by anlprb · 2012-12-28 14:15 · Score: 1, Insightful

all get together and sit Shuttleworth in a room with Linus and lock the door for an hour after Linus has been forced to use Unity for a week? That would probably solve the problem. After what they did with Unity and then with the passing search terms out to the internet, I can't recommend Ubuntu, but through Ubuntu and MATE. They really screwed the pooch on that. They had the best chance at corporate desktop standardization but really lost it with forcing Unity on people. And yes, I have used it. It bites.

--

One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...

Scary.. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-28 14:19 · Score: 0, Insightful

He's the head of Linux and he has some serious social issues!

This is not news. by JonniLuv · 2012-12-28 14:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

Seriously, someone makes a coding mistake in a pre-release kernel, there's a heated e-mail chain about it, and now it's on /. Why?

Re:Linus is an asshat, imho by godrik · 2012-12-28 14:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

I actually disaggree. This is not a private company where you are trying to spare people's feeling. It is a case of "you screw up, you get yelled at." Because it is a publicly managed project, the yelling happens in public. It also set the standard for every single other developper. The next time a user space bug is introduced. The kernel developer will not try to swipe it under the rug.

I could kiss the guy... by Qybix · 2012-12-28 14:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

I am so tempted to kiss the guy! Linux can't have this type of _OBVIOUS_ audio sabotage at the kernel level if we expect game developers to ever make their products available on Linux. Linus NEEDS to reign this in, we just can't afford it. He is 110% right.

Keep the helm firm, man! That's exactly what we need!

Qybix

--
Qybix ----- I do not have a belief system; I'm an Anti-theist and proud of it! Saying that not believing in anything i

Re:I could kiss the guy... by VortexCortex · 2012-12-28 18:45 · Score: 3, Insightful

As an application developer (and game developer by night), I concur. Test the patches before submitting them upstream. If you don't understand what the patches do, you don't approve them. Hell, that's the same requirement I have for all code in my projects. Even if it's a comment or whitespace change, you compile and (unit) test the module before committing it. It's a pretty brain dead rule of thumb: If you don't know what the fuck you're doing, don't do it! It's when you pretend to know more than you do that you get in trouble. The stupid thing is that there's no excuse for not knowing -- If all else fails, you ask the submitter who sent you the patch.
Also, take Linus' wrath with a grain of salt. He enjoys being blunt and offending those that get offended. His opinion is that you can't actually offend someone, they have to take offense themselves. He get's most pissed when he knows he's right. He accepts people calling him stupid when they're right and he's wrong, like in this talk where he gives the finger to Nvida devs... WRT an early version of the Linux kernel: "We didn't have init. We don't need init, just a boot image and root console, that's how real men do it... Then someone came along and said, 'This is stupid, you need init', and they added init" -- I'm paraphrasing, that's pretty much how I remember it from the video. Sorry, too lazy to re-watch and find the exact quote. Also contained therein is his position on being harsh...
Also, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer -- Come on, they're all notorious as being harsh At least Linus isn't parking in handy cap spaces, or throwing chairs like a real asshole.

Re:Don't piss off the boss by flargleblarg · 2012-12-28 14:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

A leader need not be paying to be boss.

Re:I love linux but... by Richy_T · 2012-12-28 14:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

There are some people who you could site down with and explain things for two hours and they would still go away and do their own thing. IT is particularly full of people like this (and I'm aware of and try to avoid my own inclinations in this direction). Sometimes, you just have to make it clear that something is important and that means raising the temperature even as (and especially as) you remain in control internally.

This is also a valuable parenting skill. I don't think that that's entirely coincidental.

Setting a wonderful example of leadership... by HockeyPuck · 2012-12-28 14:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

So it would assume that if the head of the Linux movement had rant like a child, I guess it's ok for all the other leaders of their projects, who don't have any leadership experience to follow this wonderful example.

Look Linus may be a great leader, but pompous crap like this doesn't belong. There's a reason why in management if you need to discipline/warn an employee, you do it in private not over the company mailing list.

Re:Not the bug... by krinderlin · 2012-12-28 14:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

That was my reading exactly. As a programmer, I've had to condition my responses to bug reports to move from, "What?! It's totally your fault!" to, "Let me investigate this on my end." It became fairly obvious from the get go that the patch made some changes that were overlooked in the patch. The patch commit message failed to give any reason or justification for the change (which was a 1 line change, possibly in a sea of other changes). Furthermore, the automated testing application that the patch submitter was using had a bug in it.

It's likely the testing apparatus said, "OMG! THIS ERROR VALUE IS WRONG!" Then, the submitter corrected it to fit the bad test. Honestly, while Rafael signed off on it, it would appear the submitter set him up the bomb, so to speak. Who would make a change like that without further investigation and then submit it is a serious question. I would hope the patch submitter is placed under some additional scrutiny.

All in all, Rafael took it in stride in his response. He also explained further, but appears to have capitulated that his initial reaction was wrong and that he should have fixed first, asked "Why are you using that, anyway?" later. Also, he should have never stated that, "So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, but, instead, it looks that pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious bugs and/or regressions." It's quite obvious that changing not only what error code is returned but returning one that was literally impossible without telling anyone is a Bad Thing(TM).

As for Linus's style of management, I don't know. I mean, Rafael was way, way, way out of line with that statement I quoted. He really failed to grasp the situation, even after it was clearly spelled out for him.

All in all, I think he's learned his lesson and will be better for it. He seems to have taken it well enough, at least publicly. :-)

Dude needs to read Dale Carnegie... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-28 14:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

I wouldn't speak to anyone that way unless I never wanted to see them again. Shaming someone in public like this is a way to not only get them to quit, but to make a permanent enemy out of them.

What this tells me is that Linus is better suited to be a cult leader than a manager of any kind.

Re:I wonder by Anrego · 2012-12-28 15:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

To be honest, I wish it happened more.

I _wish_ management where I am cared about quality at this level. It would be worth getting chewed out once in a while to know that stupid bugs are not tolerated.

Shit Happens by MacGyver2210 · 2012-12-28 15:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

Sometimes shit happens. Sorry for that.

Cheers,
Mauro

Wrong. Answer.

--
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits

Re:Shit Happens by Lisias · 2012-12-28 16:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

IMHO, this is the exact attitude that got Linus pissed off.

--
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org

Re:Not the bug... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-28 15:47 · Score: 2, Insightful

All in all, I think he's learned his lesson and will be better for it.

Abusing people who report to you teaches everyone in your organization that it is desirable to avoid reporting to you - either through avoiding you, getting you fired or through finding a different job. It also teaches everyone who reports to you that it is acceptable for them to be abusive too. It makes people perform poorly because they are now preoccupied with your idiosyncratic outbursts rather than just doing the work right. With lessons like these, you don't want anyone to learn them, but that's probably far too late when it comes to Linux - Linus' volatile behavior is nothing new. You don't correct a bad attitude by showing a bad attitude yourself. That aside, Linus didn't understand that the new error value return was not intended, so he was both abusive and also wrong about part of what was going on.

Re:Still.... by hairyfeet · 2012-12-28 16:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

Celeb or not I'd tell Torvalds to kiss my ass. I thought maybe that was at the end of a conversation...nope, the guy asks a simple question , one that would have taken Torvalds all of 30 seconds to explain like a rational human being, and instead he goes instantly to 11 on the douchebag scale.

I don't give a flying fuck WHO it is, be it Torvalds or Ballmer or Cook or Ellison if someone acts like a total fucking douchebag they should be called out for it and I'm calling him out, Linus Torvalds you sir are a douchebag. you could have solved the whole fucking thing in under 30 seconds by simply explaining why "it must be thus" but instead just acted like a giant flaming prick, it was completely uncalled for, the other guy was acting complete civil and politely, therefor the asshole of the week award should be given to Torvalds for flying so completely off the handle when there was zero point in it.

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Be fair by melted · 2012-12-28 16:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

The guy deals with A LOT of bullshit on a daily basis, and this was a BS patch anyway. That would be the end of it if the dude didn't start coming up with excuses. If you know you're wrong, fucking say so and make things right.

Re:Be fair by BitZtream · 2012-12-28 18:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

Did you read the thread? I don't think you did. He started off by telling the person reporting the bug that it was a user space app problem (pulse audio).
This is wrong for several reasons.
First and foremost, it is the unholiest of unholy to make a kernel change to an API that results in userland apps breaking.
Second, Linus's policy is that of the above, never is a kernel change allowed to break a userland app.
Third, the way he changed the code was in no way what so ever acceptable. He change the error code for an ioctl to NOENT, i.e. file not found ... ioctl's work on open files, its not possible to have a file not found, you're already past the point where you would get that response as you've already opened the file.
It was a shitty patch AND the patcher blamed someone else AGAINST POLICY for his own stupid mistake. THAT is why Linus tore him a new one.
He didn't get reemed for just fucking up, he got reemed for fucking up in multiple ways and blaming it on someone else, then when that was pointed out, he tried to respond with 'well other people do it' as if that is an acceptable response as well.

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Re:Be fair by aardvarkjoe · 2012-12-28 18:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

Second, Linus's policy is that of the above, never is a kernel change allowed to break a userland app.
While I don't doubt (reading quickly through the description of what happened) that this change was bad, a policy that "kernel changes can never break a userland app" seems like a bit of an odd statement to make.
In my experience (and I do do development in environments where this comes up frequently), it is not at all unusual for applications to either rely on buggy behavior of another piece of code, or to make unwarranted assumptions about how another piece of code works, that happens to be valid under some circumstances but not others. If an application does not properly handle the documented behavior of an interface, then the application is broken.
In the case of the kernel, it's impossible to validate every single piece of userland software out there will not break due to a change in behavior, and although it can be best to maintain compatibility whenever possible, at some point that can become either impossible or impractical.
Now, if the policy is that you don't break applications that are following the documented kernel interface -- well, then that makes a lot more sense.

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Re:Be fair by oatworm · 2012-12-28 18:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

In my experience (and I do do development in environments where this comes up frequently), it is not at all unusual for applications to either rely on buggy behavior of another piece of code, or to make unwarranted assumptions about how another piece of code works, that happens to be valid under some circumstances but not others.
Which is why Linus' policy is that, when the choice is between userland compatibility and better adherence to theoretical documentation of the kernel interface, tie goes to userland compatibility. This is smart - Linux already has enough issues with userland apps breaking backwards compatibility to scratch itches that nobody really has (see GNOME 3, the entire audio stack, etc.); if the kernel is disciplined, at least, it keeps the whole environment from turning into a bug-ridden tar pit.

As for Linus' attitude, well, I have to agree with Linus on this one. Fix the mistake first, either by removing the patch that broke everything or quickly implementing a fix, then ask questions. The first rule of kernel development should always be "Do No Harm". If you're in charge of some part of kernel development and you find yourself breaking that rule, you need to un-break it ASAP, then assess how you found yourself breaking it in the first place. Unfortunately, Mauro wasn't grasping that - he was too busy asking "reasonable questions" to undo the damage that his commit did when his first priority should have been to stabilize the kernel. Don't get me wrong, Mauro's questions are important and they do need to be answered, but only after userland is back to the condition he found it before the commit. And not until then. And *certainly* not with the mainline kernel.
Re:Be fair by hairyfeet · 2012-12-29 11:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

Not to mention everybody seems to be ignoring what the guy was working on, he pointed out the drivers for the built in webcams on laptops is getting EXTREMELY complex and harder and harder to debug so they were trying to simply make it less of a mess. Did he fuck up? Yes but frankly there was no call for acting like a fucking dramaqueen douchebag, he's working on an extremely complex subsystem and made a mistake...no fucking shit, nobody working on a big complex project has ever made a fuckup?
And don't give me Torvald's "we never break userland" excuse, because as the guy pointed out Pulse is locking ALL the interfaces when it takes over and that naturally is gonna cause problems when you are talking about a 2 way device like a webcam with audio. If Torvalds didn't like his approach it would have taken him a whole 30 seconds to say "We just don't do things that way, here is what you should have done" but no, he completely flies off the handle and acts like a total prick.

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It needs to be said. by redback · 2012-12-28 17:13 · Score: 3, Insightful

Sometimes stupid people need to be told they are stupid, otherwise they wont stop being stupid.

Re:Still.... by Myopic · 2012-12-28 17:15 · Score: 3, Insightful

I think it would be quite appropriate for Microsoft to track down the people responsible for Windows, and force those people to apologize to the rest of us.

Re:Get serious. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-28 17:17 · Score: 2, Insightful

The problem is that you cheap fucks don't want to pay for anything.

Lies. Check humblebundle.com, they show how much each OS spends (people are allowed to pay as much, or little, as they want). Currently:
Windows: $6.09
Mac: $7.83
Linux: $10.34

Linux has few users, but they are not cheap.

hobby OS.

Webservers, stock exchanges and electronics are run by hobbists, then.

Re:Still.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-28 18:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

Just like you could have made your point without saying: douchebag, ass, giant flaming prick, and asshole.

Re:Still.... by blind+biker · 2012-12-28 18:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

I don't give a flying fuck WHO it is, be it Torvalds or Ballmer or Cook or Ellison if someone acts like a total fucking douchebag they should be called out for it and I'm calling him out, Linus Torvalds you sir are a douchebag. you could have solved the whole fucking thing in under 30 seconds by simply explaining why "it must be thus" but instead just acted like a giant flaming prick, it was completely uncalled for, the other guy was acting complete civil and politely, therefor the asshole of the week award should be given to Torvalds for flying so completely off the handle when there was zero point in it.

Actually, the other guy, while being incompetent, was very manipulative, and it worked - with people like you. To be manipulative like that you have to have a lot of social intelligence, and that helps you to navigate situations in which your incompetence surfaces. Some people have little patience with such manipulations and fakery.

--
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Re:Linus is an asshat, imho by Xtifr · 2012-12-28 18:11 · Score: 4, Insightful

Bottom line, Linus has been in charge of the kernel for a couple of decades now, and his process is working. He doesn't flip out very often, so when he does, every who counts knows that some serious fuckups happened. And anyone who doesn't count (which in this case, almost certainly includes both you and me) can probably go fuck themselves if they don't like it.

Nobody in the world knows for sure how to manage a project like Linux. It is truly unprecedented. But Linus's way is working better than anyone would have expected two decades ago. If you want to second-guess him, feel free to start your own competing project and manage it your way. His way is working better than anything anyone else has ever tried, even if it's not "the best way".

Re:Still.... by Sir_Sri · 2012-12-28 18:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

Or it looks like someone had a temper tantrum because he's a celebrity and doesn't have to be decent to other people.

And the thing is, that happens. A lot. Even at microsoft. "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard!" - Bill Gates. And that was in Paul Allens book, and apparently an oft used phrase.

Linux lives and breathes on its contributors, if you make too many public scenes you can end up with a lot of important people and companies saying it's not worth it to contribute to, or it's not worth it to contribute to under Torvalds, that would be a very ugly mess for the entire industry. Worse still is if this sort of behaviour sets the tone for everyone else trying to be the next Linus, and they try to copy his to behavior (and that definitely happened at microsoft) and you end up with an organization full of asshole managers who no one wants to work for. At least microsoft can hold out the carrot of a fat paycheck to put up with it, Linux relies on people volunteering to help.

Granted, it's not really a shock that Torvalds likes to... speak his mind. That's part of his thing. Still, it poses a lot of questions about the sort of person who's going to be around to succeed him if he gets hit by a bus so to speak. Certainly Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer have not been able to find the right magic replacing their more famous bosses, and one would hope Linux manages better than Apple and MS have, admittedly, those jobs are completely different.

Re:Still.... by sockman · 2012-12-28 19:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

Seriously, if as an enthusiast I submitted a patch that broke user space and got a beat down from Linus I'd be a bit sad. If, as a PAID developer, I submitted a patch that broke user space AND THEN blamed the user space applications and got a beat down I'd wonder wtf am I doing writing software.

You never, ever, blame the end user for your fuck ups. Even more so when you changed the API/ABI and fucked it up yourself.

Linus is an ass, but when dealing with someone who goes full asshole on the user space devs over his fuck up, he was a justifiable ass.

Re:Still.... by tezbobobo · 2012-12-28 19:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

I don't know why you were marked as a troll. I would have the same reaction as you. Doing something stupid is not a free ticket for people to be rude. Linus was unprofessional.

It'll make Linux better by Taco+Cowboy · 2012-12-28 20:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

...and then it makes Linux as an operating system -- and everything that runs on it and depends on it, look bad...

While I agree that this incident does put Linux on the front pages in part of the Net, I seriously doubt the "look bad" part.

In fact, imho, this incident will generate more positive than negative for Linux.

Admins and users that are still sitting on the fence would take note, that Linus just don't take fuck as an excuse - and if anyone dares to fuck up like that fella he will get a public tongue lashing - and the top priority of Linux is to *NOT INTRODUCE ANY USERSPACE BUG*.

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Re:It'll make Linux better by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-29 03:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

Hum?! What?!
How long have you been disconnected from reality? Although I do feel that he was a bit too harsh, he does have a point. As a kernel maintainer he does have responsibilities and it's quite obvious they weren't met.
It's no different from being employed in a company, someone screws up and can go from not being taken into account for promotion or plainly being fired depending on the incident proportion.
Even at our homes our parents would puts us in place if we did something wrong that we should already know better (or we ourselves do it to our children).
And blame is a good tool as any when used correctly, like any other tool. So no contributor-hostile culture, just irresponsability and incompetency hostile culture. I can live with that... heck, I even cheer wholeheartedly for that.

Re:Really, Linus? by Todd+Knarr · 2012-12-28 22:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

This isn't backwards compatibility. It's the same basic rule we have to follow where I work: you DO NOT EVER make unannounced/unplanned changes that break the way other modules interact with yours. Period, end of line. Break that rule with any sort of regularity and you'll be looking for a job. If you need to make a change like that, it's on you to justify why and then to coordinate with everyone else to make sure everything that needs changed gets changed. It's not a hard rule to understand or to follow. If you can't, you have no business messing with an operating system kernel.

Re:Still.... by MichaelKristopeitDad · 2012-12-28 22:44 · Score: 5, Insightful

Doing something stupid is not a free ticket for people to be rude.

Doing something stupid doesn't. Doing something stupid, not apologizong for it, failing to fix it in a timely manner and then blaming the stupidity on other people's code - when kernel policy clearly state it's YOUR responsibility - is much closer to the free ticket, wouldn't you say?

Re:Still.... by philip.paradis · 2012-12-29 00:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

Or it looks like someone had a temper tantrum because he's a celebrity and doesn't have to be decent to other people.

He cares more about the product being right than other peoples' opinion of him.

And the thing is, that happens. A lot. Even at microsoft. "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard!" - Bill Gates. And that was in Paul Allens book, and apparently an oft used phrase.

Sometimes the truth hurts.

Linux lives and breathes on its contributors, if you make too many public scenes you can end up with a lot of important people and companies saying it's not worth it to contribute to, or it's not worth it to contribute to under Torvalds, that would be a very ugly mess for the entire industry.

Nope. Linus has been Linus his whole life. This "story" isn't anything new. Oddly enough, Linux keeps marching onward, with plenty of contributors who are both volunteers and paid by various corporations to contribute work.

Worse still is if this sort of behaviour sets the tone for everyone else trying to be the next Linus, and they try to copy his to behavior (and that definitely happened at microsoft) and you end up with an organization full of asshole managers who no one wants to work for.

Again, the truth hurts. Projects like these don't tolerate stupidity well, especially given the fact that it's a community effort and there has to be a lot of lack of testing and communication on the part of the responsible party when something breaks like this. The price to be paid is twofold: (1) very public expressions of the harm caused by such issues, and (2) potential relief from duties related to the issue at hand, whether temporary or permanent in nature.

Granted, it's not really a shock that Torvalds likes to... speak his mind. That's part of his thing. Still, it poses a lot of questions about the sort of person who's going to be around to succeed him if he gets hit by a bus so to speak. Certainly Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer have not been able to find the right magic replacing their more famous bosses, and one would hope Linux manages better than Apple and MS have, admittedly, those jobs are completely different.

Step right up if you can do it better or know others who can. It takes strong leadership founded on the idea that others follow you primarily for you technical ability, and secondarily for your "soft skills" to manage a technical project of this scale. Sometimes people have problems replacing their famous bosses because while the old boss may have been widely regarded as an asshole, he was an effective asshole, and numbers (whether measured in uptime, lack of showstopping functional bugs, level of attention to security issues, or profit per quarter) don't lie.

All things considered, I saw far worse than this in my prior military service (Navy submarine force, ET-COM) in cases where somebody did something stupid that resulted in a systems failure, and oddly enough some aspects of this whole deal remind me a bit of organizational units in the services that pride themselves on putting job performance and technical ability first. Those who get butthurt about being dressed down are free to find something else to do with their time.

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Write failed: Broken pipe

Re:Still.... by omb · 2012-12-29 00:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

No, as most maintainers agree Tovolds was exactly right and has said the same thing at least 10'000 times on LKML, often with detailed reasoning.

One of the reasons that the kernel is excellent is Linus has GOOD TASTE.

That he dosn't suffer fools gladly is one of his better features, MFG, omb

Re:Still.... by Rich0 · 2012-12-29 01:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

So simply being a nice person is now manipulative because it makes people like you? Do you even realise what you're saying?

There is nothing nice about causing harm for no reason to other people (users in this case) while smiling and talking politely.

If somebody rear-ends my car at a light, they have caused me harm. Do I therefore get out of my car and start screaming at him to "punish" him for his sins? No, I simply call the police to have a report created, and exchange insurance info. It will no doubt cost the guy money, and his insurance company will no doubt give him incentive not to repeat the incident. But, the fact is that it was an accident - that is why we call them accidents.

People mess up - it is a defining characteristic of humanity. Sometimes they even mess up and don't realize that they messed up. If you can't deal with this, then go do the rest of the human race a favor and have yourself committed.

And as far as "for no reason" goes, read the entire thread. There actually was a reason for the patch, and the reason was a good one. The implementation was incorrect, but the intent was not malicious.

Re:Still.... by Rich0 · 2012-12-29 01:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

Uh, Linus might have good taste in patches, but he has horrible taste in human interaction. Anybody who doesn't think so has equally horrible taste.

The guy who made the commit wasn't a fool - he made a mistake. If he was a fool, then Linus was a fool to grant him commit access.

Re:Still.... by gbjbaanb · 2012-12-29 03:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

"many eyes" making the code work seem to be obsolete when you have a club that you have to be a member of before they take notice of you. Its always been this way in so many fields of human endeavour - if you're expecting the community around Linux to be different and based on technical excellence only then you have a lot to learn about people.

The trick is to acknowledge that you're not "one of them" and approach the task of submitting your patch like this - submit the patch as normal, and then contact Linus or someone with an email humbly telling them that you've noticed a little bug that slipped through and that you've submitted a patch that you think will fix the problem - once you have their attention enough to look at the fix, they'll be ready to accept it, as if it was something they'd noticed themselves. I guess that once you've done this a couple of times, they'd accept your future patches without review.

I know its not supposed to work that way, but it does... I'd be interested to know how you went about the submission process. It could be that they were just too busy to review all the patches that were submitted, so yours languished, un-noticed for so long.

Re:Still.... by 3vi1 · 2012-12-29 03:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

Your analogy is flawed. It was the users that were rear-ended, not Torvalds. Torvalds is the judge throwing the book at the driver who rear-ended you when he keeps trying to say it was all *your* fault.

Re:Still.... by swillden · 2012-12-29 05:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

Nope. Linus has been Linus his whole life. This "story" isn't anything new. Oddly enough, Linux keeps marching onward, with plenty of contributors who are both volunteers and paid by various corporations to contribute work.

It's more than that.

Linux powers tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars worth of systems. It's unbelievably huge, and it's almost inconceivable that all of the megacorporations whose business depends so deeply on it didn't snatch control of the whole thing away from the lone kid who started it as a hobby project long ago. I mean, who would have predicted that even after it had become so important, Linux would still be maintained by the one guy who started it, rather than some joint committee of top-tier OS engineers -- probably dominated by IBM?

Not only is that not what's happened, but as far as I can see none of those megacorps even try to tell Linus what to do. They submit patches, humbly formatted and refactored into the form Linus wants, and they butter him up with conference tickets, free hardware and the like, and they even compete for the right to pay him a salary.

Why is that? Because whatever anyone says about him, his style, his attitude, his people skills or even his code... the results are fantastic. Linux not only works very well, it does so across an amazing variety of hardware platforms, and the design -- and Linus' good taste and fanatical attention to detail -- have proven to be able to support virtually any new idea that's worth implementing.

Love Linus or hate him... don't mess it up. Luckily, Linus is an egotistical bastard who doesn't care what anyone thinks anyway, so mere words aren't likely to change anything.

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Re:Still.... by swillden · 2012-12-29 05:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

Seriously, if as an enthusiast I submitted a patch that broke user space and got a beat down from Linus I'd be a bit sad.

As an "enthusiast" your userspace-breaking patch would never have made it to Linus. It would have had to go through the maintainer of its respective subsystem -- and perhaps more than one -- who would have caught the problem and told you to fix it. Likely much more nicely.

What happened here was a senior, experienced submitter did something really dumb, and it was a huge problem because he was sufficiently trusted not to do such dumb things that there was no one watching closely enough to catch it. Linus doesn't have enough hours in the day to thoroughly review everything that comes through, he has to make judgment calls based on the degree of trust he has in the source. Mauro let him down in a big way, then compounded it by trying to make excuses for it.

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Re:Still.... by hairyfeet · 2012-12-29 11:22 · Score: 1, Insightful

Not to mention everybody is completely missing the point, which is thus:...the guy is working on a complex subsystem with some serious driver issues, and he made a mistake, so what? in a complex project mistakes are gonna happen. He points out that the behavior of a good portion of the drivers is exactly like what he wrote therefor Pulse is gonna break with all those drivers as well which is why he thinks its a Pulse problem, because the kernel guys didn't write ALL those drivers, and the Pulse locking is gonna be puking when it gets to ANY of those drivers, which are many.

ALL LINUS HAD TO DO was spend a lousy 30 seconds saying "That may be, but here is how you should go about this" and done, that's it, problem solved, explanation given, error corrected. Does he do this? Nope he goes total apeshit and acts like a five year old that had his toy broken and just goes fucking nuts, when the other guy was actually acting like a rational human being. I'm sorry but dramaqueen douchebag of the week goes to Linus Torvalds for having a shitfit and big giant freakout when a simple 30 second explanation would have solved the whole thing with ZERO drama involved.

And people wonder why Linux devs have this rep of being little elitist jerks? this is the kind of behavior I'd expect from Drepper, NOT Torvalds.

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Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug

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