Linus Torvalds Promises Profanity Over Linux 3.10-rc5

Profanity? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

Calm and measured explanations of just what the coders are doing wrong would be ever so much more helpful. If all Linus is going to do is mouth off then perhaps it's time he just STFU and GTFO.

Re:Profanity? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:13 · Score: 5, Funny

Profanity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.
Re:Profanity? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:14 · Score: 5, Insightful

He did explained, which is "donâ(TM)t stop sending him non-critical stuff, he is going to start cursing again."
Obviously, people have not gotten his memo for the last 10 kernel releases- we've been hearing about this complaint since 3.0.
He is pissed because he has to waste time going thru the code for every single commit that should not go into a RC build.
At this point there's really only 2 things he can do- deny the commits, or/and swear at the dev. What else can he do, fire them?
Re:Profanity? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:41 · Score: 5, Funny

what are you trying to say, bitch?
FTFY
Re:Profanity? by Anonymous+Psychopath · 2013-06-09 07:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

Calm and measured explanations of just what the coders are doing wrong would be ever so much more helpful. If all Linus is going to do is mouth off then perhaps it's time he just STFU and GTFO.
I think he should take your advice. Clearly his methods have been unsuccessful.

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Re:Profanity? by Stumbles · 2013-06-09 07:44 · Score: 4, Interesting

Yeah he could do that and spend a lot of time spinning his wheels when a few well placed curses upon the offenders pet or pets would stop or reduce his spin time. Just how many times does he need to repeat himself after a while it becomes clear some public chastising might get their attention.

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My karma is not a Chameleon.
Re:Profanity? by Nivag064 · 2013-06-09 09:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

You obviously don't appreciate his sense of humour.
If you think he puts other people down, he can do worse to himself. I remember reading emails years ago when he released a kernel update saying in very picturesque language that he stuffed up the previous release.
He has also found being polite, can be worse for people.
I wish I was good enough for him to insult me! However, I am not a kernel hacker, so fat chance.
If someone sends a patch which is terrible from an unknown, he is likely just to ignore it, but a good patch that did the job would go into the kernel with no fuss. If someone competent sends in a patch he doesn't like, with something he thinks is really bad, he will say so in no uncertain terms.
I have been reading what he has written and seeing videos of him, from time to time for over 20 years, so I understand where he is coming from and have immense respect for him.
He is neither a smarmy politician or a hypocritical religious evangelist - he is extremely honest, competent, & caring. Don't judge him by such superficial considerations that you seem to use.
Re:Profanity? by murdocj · 2013-06-09 09:19 · Score: 3, Informative

Yes, there is something wrong with being a dick. It is very, VERY rare that people need to be dicks. What I've find is that people who enjoy being dicks find excuses to be dicks, no matter what.
Re:Profanity? by Nivag064 · 2013-06-09 09:26 · Score: 3, Informative

You are truly clueless - I've just read what he actually said, he was actually giving a very mild rebuke in a humours way - and considering the situation, he was more than justified to be harsher!
Re: Profanity? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 09:36 · Score: 3, Funny

I concede that profanity may add humor when used in the right situations, however it in no way gives greater control of a language. The purpose of language is communication. And there is always a more intelligent way to express an idea than dropping the F-bomb.
Fuck you.
Re:Profanity? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 09:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

Calm and measured explanations of just what the coders are doing wrong would be ever so much more helpful.
Bull mother-fucking pussy. There is not one fucking shred of evidence to support that claim, and you sure as hell haven't written a single good line of code.
You can write an algorithm ten ways, all of which accomplish the task. Objectively, they all work.
But at least 9 of them are going to be fucking ugly and cause problems down the line. It is good for someone to tell you sooner that something you wrote is fucked up than to discover that later.
It's like writing material for stand-up or sketch comedy. All your jokes might have all the elements of humor, they "work" in that sense. But some asshole has to say, "no, that's fucking garbage, it's not good enough," and he has to do that for 95% of what you wrote. Otherwise you won't find out until you're standing in front of an audience and they're booing your ass off stage.
Re:Profanity? by epyT-R · 2013-06-09 10:45 · Score: 3, Insightful

Being blunt and direct is the only way to fight the catty, passive aggressive behavior seen in modern social interaction. If anything, to people like linus, saying dumb things and then hiding behind your feelings when called out on it is dickish.
Re:Profanity? by Kjella · 2013-06-09 10:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

Calm and measured explanations of just what the coders are doing wrong would be ever so much more helpful. If all Linus is going to do is mouth off then perhaps it's time he just STFU and GTFO.
Mostly he's talking to seasoned veterans at kernel development who damn well know what the rules are, they just choose to bend them. They're always pushing and he's the one who has to push back, measured explanations is as useless as explaining to boys that trying to sneak a peek into the girl's locker room is wrong. Of course they knew that but they did it anyway and a "please don't do that" won't discourage anyone from trying again. Even if he rejects the patches unless he talks back he becomes the wall people throw crap at to see what sticks. Usually The I'd call developers who should know better behaving in ways that are destructive to the project a management problem, but he's the project manager so his way of resolving it is to give people a well-deserved ass chewing on the LKML. Don't knock it if it works...

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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Profanity? by PPH · 2013-06-09 12:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

Expletives are like rim shots. They work well to emphasize a certain point. Trouble is; some people are stuck playing drum solos.

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Have gnu, will travel.
Re:Profanity? by tibman · 2013-06-09 13:31 · Score: 2

Europeans sound like dicks to most Americans. What one culture considers to be candid the other considers to be rude.

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http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Re: Profanity? by philip.paradis · 2013-06-09 14:41 · Score: 2

I must object to this fucking view, on the grounds that the F-word is very versatile.

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Write failed: Broken pipe
Re:Profanity? by oatworm · 2013-06-09 19:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

Pretty much this. There are three ways to handle disagreements:

1. Engage in a respectful, carefully thought out conversation weighing the pros and cons of each position, then achieving some sort of consensus.
2. "Agree to disagree", then passive-aggressively do your own thing or otherwise lobby with others to follow your path over the other person's path.
3. "Be a dick", call the person out, and make it clear that, since you're the one making the decisions, you are the one making that decision, not them.

Option 1 is great when you have nothing but time on your hands and/or when you're dealing with someone whose opinion you trust. It's also only useful when there's a clear definition of "right" and "wrong" regarding the topic at hand - more often than not, choices in life and engineering pretty much boil down to "which trade-offs suck less for the domain we're working in", which are more subjective than not in most cases. Option 2 is the default position drilled into our heads during school, which is a useful default when you're dealing with equals or people who you have no authority over - I mean, sure, you can yell and scream at them, but it's not like they're required to listen. The catch with option 2, though, is that, though it leads to less hurt feelings in the short run, you're as liable to have different factions competing against each other to prove who's "right", which can lead to some major issues down the road.

Option 3, meanwhile, is useful when you're in a hurry, a decision needs to be made now, and it needs to be made decisively. The goal here is to nip a problem in the bud before it metastasizes into something serious and political. In this case, Linus wants to enforce some discipline on the code review process because his time is finite and the deadline is near for 3.10 to get out the door, and "receive lots of crap code and reject it" doesn't solve that problem. He needs to not receive non-essential code in the first place. The only way to do that is by convincing those committing code to make only meaningful commits, either through well-defined requirements (tried; apparently that's failing), polite warnings (what Slashdot picked up here tonight), or "being a dick" (Linus will continue the beatings until morale improves if his warning isn't heeded).

Personally, I've found that the sort of people that claim "being a dick" is the sole refuge of people that enjoy being dicks are the sort of people that have a reflexive inability to defend their opinions under any sort of sustained criticism and just assume that, if their "brilliance" needs to be defended, it's because it's being witnessed by simpletons that just "don't get it". From where I'm sitting, that's a pretty dickish and passive-aggressive position to adopt and I... well, come to think of it, I actually do enjoy being a dick to people that think like that. Seriously, screw them.

Huh. Guess I pretty much proved the grandparent's point right there, didn't I?
Re: Profanity? by Merls+the+Sneaky · 2013-06-09 23:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

People who make these sorts of arguments against using profanity only convey "I will use and ad hominem to dissuade its use because I personally do not like profanity".

Re:profanity by Microlith · 2013-06-09 06:13 · Score: 2, Interesting

No, it's why Linux has made so much progress. It has nothing to do with why "businesses choose Microsoft."

Torvalds is right by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:13 · Score: 2, Interesting

When you are maintaining a project of this size and you get bothered by little annoying cosmetical fixes and non-critical bugs you do lose your temper. I have to say he stayed pretty civilized till now. I suggest we start a kick-starter project to give torvalds the vacation he really needs!

Re:Torvalds is right by swalve · 2013-06-09 06:23 · Score: 3, Interesting

Maybe he should train some devs to take over some of the stuff he's doing. If Linus's genius is the only thing that keeps Linux on track, he's doing it wrong. Delegate or Linux will not survive long term.
Re:Torvalds is right by HiThere · 2013-06-09 08:41 · Score: 4, Informative

I think you haven't been following Linux development very long. There are several branches at all times, each with their own maintainer. Linus controls the final merge, but it's the same basic process used in the other trees.
The question is, when Linus retires, will there be one sucessor or several, not whether there will be any. And that depends on the politics at the time.
Also, somebody needs to be in charge of the final merge. Some one person. If you have several independent trees, each one of them needs someone in charge of the merges into their trees. It's better PR to have one tree that is released. Currently that one's managed by Linus. But note that that's PR. Each distro really manages it's own tree, and they can accept and reject software and patches without reference to what Linus decides. And they frequently do. For eas of reference they generally describe what they're using as a customization of some particular Linux kernel.

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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.

Re:profanity by UnknowingFool · 2013-06-09 06:14 · Score: 5, Insightful

Am I the only one that sees the dead hamster thing as a joke? Linus is not happy but he also seems to be making light of the situation. As for businesses choosing MS over Linux, I suppose you don't wander into many server rooms. I know in ones I've been in, there are as many or more Linux servers than Windows servers.

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Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

Re:profanity by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

Business owners aren't reading the linux kernel mailing list.

Here is my message to Linus by dugancent · 2013-06-09 06:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Grow up.

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SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me

Re:Here is my message to Linus by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

Mine is "Thanks!"

Re:profanity by 93+Escort+Wagon · 2013-06-09 06:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

Oh come on. Did people shun Microsoft when Ballmer did the Sweaty Monkey Dance or threaten to "fucking kill Google"?

No one of consequence cares when Linus Torcalds acts like a petulant child - if they have an interest in Linux, they're more concerned about support availability and duration.

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#DeleteChrome

Re:Yay; Linus the motivator by UnknowingFool · 2013-06-09 06:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

You understand what "release candidate" is right? A release candidate is not a time for adding new enhancements. It should be for streamlining and tightening the code for release. The fact that RC5 is bigger than RC4 means that people either were not doing their jobs in the previous 3 releases or that the code submitted earlier was so crappy that it needs more work. Release candidates should get smaller than the previous not larger.

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Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

Re:profanity by msobkow · 2013-06-09 06:19 · Score: 4, Funny

That's right. Instead of cursing in public, Microsoft executives throw furniture...

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I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.

Well... by SirLurksAlot · 2013-06-09 06:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

Everyone has to have a hobby, right?

Seriously though, who the hell cares if the RC is bigger than the one before it, or whether the changes are scattered everywhere? If there were any number of concerns that needed to be addressed before the next release then it wasn't ready to go in the first place. Just test the hell out of everything, make sure nothing is broken, and make sure that each change was necessary and correct. In short calm your tits and keep coding.

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God, schmod. I want my monkey man!

Re:Well... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:30 · Score: 2, Informative

The point of the release candidate process is to provide something that contains the entirety of the feature set in a release, but to provide it for testing, not release.
Re:Well... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:34 · Score: 5, Informative

He's angry because many of the changes are to non-critical stuff. That's not the priority, and it gets in the way.
Here's part of his quote in context, which the summary didn't bother to provide:

Guys, guys, guys. I'm going to have to start cursing again unless you stop sending me non-critical stuff. So the next pull request I get that has "cleanups" or just pointless churn, I'm going to call you guys out on, and try to come up with new ways to insult you, you mother, and your deceased pet hamster.
Re:Well... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 06:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

I don't think you understand how software engineering works, Computer science maybe, but software engineering, clearly not. Or maybe you just didn't read TFA.
The problem isn't that the release is too broken, nor that a lot of critical fixes are needed. It's that devs are committing excessive non-critical stuff. At this point in the release cycle, ONLY critical stuff should be committed.
Linus has every right to be a bit angered. He's done so effectively, in a way that will get the devs attention (hopefully) and he's made a joke out of it. If that has no effect, he has every right to become MORE than a bit angered.
Re:Well... by Todd+Knarr · 2013-06-09 06:39 · Score: 5, Informative

Because people aren't sending him fixes for concerns that have to be addressed before the release. They're sending him "this is a bit messy, here's code that looks a bit cleaner" or "it works but I don't like it so here's a different way to do the same thing". And sometimes as the manager you have to smack the devs with the cluebat to get them to remember that it doesn't matter if the code's messy or ugly, it doesn't matter if there's another way to do it, it doesn't matter if there's a better way to do it, by the time you're at the release-candidate stage the only things you should be sending in changes for are fixes for the things that're actually not working right. If you don't, they'll keep tweaking forever and you'll never get a release. As a dev myself I can understand where Linus is coming from here. I doubt he's even really mad at anyone, just irritated at everyone and issuing a pointed reminder that there's a difference between what the devs want to do and what they ought to be doing before he does have to get mad at anyone.
Re:Well... by toopok4k3 · 2013-06-09 07:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

The thing is, those belong to the next kernel version at RC state. Not as RC fixes. People are screwing up by not following the proper process.
Re:Well... by darkfeline · 2013-06-09 08:20 · Score: 2

This is important to keep in mind. As much as I want better Linux support for these things, first and foremost I want stable support, not buggy support as Windows is known for. The proper process reserves RCs for bugfixes, which is something I can stand behind.
Re:Well... by HiThere · 2013-06-09 08:54 · Score: 2

It's *much* worse than that. Every change is a potential new bug, even if it fixes a standing bug. Well, if it fixes a standing bug, maybe it's worthwhile. But if it doesn't, it means that all the pervious tests haven't passed the new code. This is extremely bad. It's not good even in documentation. (I've had an important part of a system fail because of a bug introduced when documentation was changed. But that's VERY rare.)
At the release candidate stage ONLY bug-fixes should be accepted. In the late release candidate stage, only bug-fixes for significant bugs should be accepted. In a final release candidate stage, only bug-fixes for critical bugs should be accepted.

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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:Well... by greg1104 · 2013-06-09 09:17 · Score: 3, Informative

Telling a contributor that they shouldn't be submitting the code they worked on is a great way to kill creativity and drive people away from the project.
Know what's an even better way to drive people away from a project? Never ship a high quality release, so your users give up and stop deploying your program. Adding immature developers to a project isn't a gain either, and that's what this whole "you'll kill my creativity" angle is--a mix of immaturity and ego.
You can adopt tactics toward tight change control to try and reduce bug count, or you can let developers work with an unbounded target where people can change things forever. But you can't do both, and Linus is running a project where it's important to ship releases. In every project there are some developers with an ego or authority issue, ones who think the rules around release candidates don't apply to them, that their changes are important, and surely they cannot introduce bugs. But that's how amateur coders think, and adding people with that attitude doesn't benefit any serious project.

RC release are for bux fixes, not new features by chromaexcursion · 2013-06-09 06:22 · Score: 5, Informative

There's a more complete explanation in the article.
At this point in the RC cycle, the expectation is that only bug fixes will be introduced. The latest merge include changes that had nothing to do with listed issues.
New features belong in the 3.11 branch.

Re:RC release are for bux fixes, not new features by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-09 09:01 · Score: 5, Funny

New features belong in the 3.11 branch.
a "workgroup" feature, for example?

Yell at the release manager not the developers by davidwr · 2013-06-09 06:32 · Score: 2

It's the release manager's call to decide what to take. He could've said "no" but didn't. Heck, he could've yelled at the developers and said "HELL @#$^ING NO" in public, but he didn't.

It's also his job to take the heat for unpopular decisions and defend them if necessary.

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Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.

I don't get what the developers are thinking by NotSoHeavyD3 · 2013-06-09 06:45 · Score: 5, Interesting

I mean speaking as a developer when I'm working and at this point I don't want to put in any new features. It's usually one of the managers or QA with a stupid "Hey lets put in a new feature right at the end" request.(And then it becomes "How willing am I to put up a fight over this?") I'm honestly surprised with no managers (and I mean business oriented managers) that this still happened.

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Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.

Re:Whew by derGoldstein · 2013-06-09 06:53 · Score: 4, Informative

It's comparatively tame this time. When I clicked on the link I expected much more flamboyant profanity. This isn't going into his top-ten vitriolic reactions, not even close (Google "linus torvalds hates" and see how many auto-completes you get).

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Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.

Re:profanity by gagol · 2013-06-09 07:06 · Score: 2

Business choose microsoft, because business has choosen microsoft for 25 years...

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Tomorrow is another day...

Re:first by theguyfromsaturn · 2013-06-09 07:14 · Score: 2

I'm still running Debian on 64 MB of RAM. With Xwindows and icewm. I can even browse the interwebs for a while with firefox until I hit a page with javascript requirements that beat the OS requirements. Sadly that is becoming the norm (I'm looking at you gmail)

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I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)

Re:profanity by tragedy · 2013-06-09 07:18 · Score: 2

This is why businesses choose Microsoft.

Ah yes, no raging, chair-throwing, monkey-boy dancing whack-jobs running a solid organization like Microsoft, after all.

Re:profanity by Runaway1956 · 2013-06-09 07:20 · Score: 2

I'll PM Linus right now, and tell him that he should never apply for a job with Mr. Anonymous Coward. And, which of the Fortune 500 companies do you work for, Sir?

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"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br

Re:Enthusiasts are limited (correction) by Tablizer · 2013-06-09 07:21 · Score: 2

correction: "then"

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Table-ized A.I.

Re:Who determines what gets comitted? by Todd+Knarr · 2013-06-09 07:41 · Score: 5, Informative

It's a three-layer process. Devs themselves are expected to adhere to the rules. Then the subsystem maintainers are supposed to filter changes to their subsystems. And finally Linus is the final arbiter on what gets merged into the release branch. Technically devs can check in anything they want, but it has to go through the subsystem maintainers and Linus to get into the release. Linus' role here is prodding the subsystem maintainers and the devs themselves to remember the rules and stop sending him so many things to sort through. It's easier on him if it's 90% rubber-stamp approvals and if a few stragglers get through it's not causing any widespread issues, as opposed to if it's 50% cruft and if he doesn't scrutinize everything carefully it's going to be a mess.

Re:first by Richy_T · 2013-06-09 07:45 · Score: 3, Informative

No. For a comparison, you need to look at usage requirements. If all you need is something on the level of fvwm, you can't get there with Windows.

Businesses are Fucking Profane by neoshroom · 2013-06-09 07:47 · Score: 2

Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business? -- Bill Gates

Of course, what you don't often hear is the response to that question, where they decided through intensive bureaucratic meetings to compromise between the two positions and make a browser, but make it such a bad browser that it would slowly drive them out of business. The rest is history.

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Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.

Re:Leave my late pet hamster out of it! by wonkey_monkey · 2013-06-09 07:53 · Score: 3, Funny

the rudest word in the universe.

Belgium.

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systemd is Roko's Basilisk.

Re:first by im_thatoneguy · 2013-06-09 08:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

I would ask though whether that's useful or just technological masturbation.

When RAM is plentiful and cheap and even your average smartphone has more than 1GB of RAM are you sacrificing anything by only using a few MB of RAM instead of GBs?

There clearly is purely wasteful uses of RAM but there is also fully utilizing your available resources. RAM is cheap and plentiful. I would rather a system be responsive and fully featured than tick off some statistic on how few resources it uses. A 486 uses less power than an intel core i7. But you'll get a lot more per watt out of the i7.

Ultimately the metric I care about most is productivity.

Re:profanity by psergiu · 2013-06-09 08:28 · Score: 2, Insightful

Business also choose microsoft because microsoft has a special budget line for "greasing" key factors at those businesses.

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Hero's don't last for ever. by jellomizer · 2013-06-09 08:52 · Score: 2

I have always had an issue with "Hero's" in people minds, either being a religious figure, or a vocal member of some group.
hat
They are all human, and most of us experience some point(s) in our lives where we seemed to do some great things, however we are human we fail, make mistakes, or just loose track, or our morals.

In Open Source Figures such as Linus and RMS, while they did good things in the past, have been using their fame to push what ever tantrum they have at the time. Because of their Hero status there will be enough people who will follow them, they will allow their mind to twist to follow their views as they are considered a Hero.

For all people you need to take a step back and realize they are human, no better or worse then us. The Stereotype Superman or the Stereotype Dr. Evil really doesn't exist, people are complex with good and bad.

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If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.

Re:profanity by stephanruby · 2013-06-09 08:56 · Score: 3, Funny

This is why businesses choose Microsoft.

Until they watch a video of an overweight Ballmer sweating, shouting, cursing, and throwing chairs at his own people.

That's also why many businesses switched to Apple when Steve Jobs was around. Steve Jobs was well known for his saint-like patience and composure with his underlings.

Re:profanity by NotBorg · 2013-06-09 08:58 · Score: 2

This is why businesses choose Microsoft.

That's right! Businesses care about Profanity Hardened Kernels when the kernel would be used on a desktop. Everything else is a-oh-kay. Cars, supercomputers, servers, printers, routers, phones, tablets, cameras, toasters, Large Hadron Colliders, space stations... There's no business in any of that so PHK doesn't matter there.

However, on the desktop, it really matters. Fuck you Linus!!!!! Your potty mouth alone is what holds back Linux on the desktop!!!! It's the only market Linux sucks at and it's the only market businesses care about. The corollary is clear.

Linus, grow up. Bite your tongue and pick up a chair like a professional. Also when you're on stage if you could scream and run around a bit, that would help too. It's how professionals act.

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I want this account deleted.

Re:Who determines what gets comitted? by HiThere · 2013-06-09 09:04 · Score: 2

Deciding how to refuse to accept changes without alienating the coders. So he's reluctant to reject the code they've worked so hard on without a specific reason. Here he's reminding people of what the reason is when a release candidate is being worked on. (He's also suggesting that they stage it for the next version.)

Anyone who gets offended at this particular post is just being silly. It's not directed at anyone in particular, it's just a general notice that they should notice that the version says "Release Candidate" and act appropriately. And not get offended if he rejects inappropriate code changes.

Please note, Linus can't pay developers, so he has to use other approaches. This one seems to work. (Actually, he's being quite mild here. Much moreso than the Slashdot headline indicates.)

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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.

Mod parent up. by sconeu · 2013-06-09 09:38 · Score: 2

He nailed it. At the rc4/rc5 level, the ONLY things that should be going in are bug fixes against this release. Not "cleanup" or new features. Those belong to the next release.

Linus is dead right on this, and everyone who has EVER done serious development should know it.

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General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.

Re:first by Bert64 · 2013-06-09 09:40 · Score: 2

And you'll get more per watt from a lower clocked i7 or an ARM... And power is all important on battery powered devices...
And although ram is cheap, it still has a cost, and that cost soon adds up... Think of hundreds of workstations, or installations of virtual machines etc, halving the memory requirement could be a significant saving.

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Re:Whew by sconeu · 2013-06-09 09:42 · Score: 4, Funny

Your mother *and* your dead hamster?

But, I thought your mother *was* a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries?

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General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.

Re:profanity by Kjella · 2013-06-09 10:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

Linux the kernel runs extremely well on everything from smartphones to supercomputers, obviously it's more than ready for the desktop. The challenge (remember, we don't have problems anymore) is the desktop environment and the applications, none of which are Linus' responsibility. And right now I'd take bets that Android hybrids conquers the desktop before Unity, Gnome 3, KDE or any of the existing solutions do. Too bad we can't clone him so he could run those projects too, because he's got both the doer gene and the manager gene. Forget about the kernel for a moment, remember the BitKeeper debacle? Other managers of a huge project like the kernel might do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone else but Linus who sits down and cranks out git on top of everything else. He's not just floating on past glory, he keep earning that respect he enjoys.

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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings

Re:first by u16084 · 2013-06-09 10:40 · Score: 2

No - I refuse to restrict myself to your definition of "modern full-feature DE's". There is really no need for these desktop environments. - Who are you trying to fool? GUIS are there to assist you. Sure some platforms overly assist the user, but living in a terminal/command line might actually slow you down at times. Why not be able to get all the information you need at a glance, vs scrolling through log files/grepping your life away. Not trying to troll, but you might be the exception.

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-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma

Re:Yay; Linus the motivator by eyenot · 2013-06-09 11:25 · Score: 2

Soooooo to make sure this is always the case, Linus should obviously be reaching out to code obfuscators. Obviously legible, robust code is not at issue -- shorter, smaller code using more geeky twists and obfuscations is the best possible fucking idea for any huge, gigantic-ass code base.

I mean, I can understand getting pissed about new features being added. But obviously the point of a release candidate is to slowly compress and obfuscate the code into smaller and smaller renditions until it's humanly unreadable because, hell, fuck, god damn, that's how progress works in open-source land. Smaller = better.

Oh I dunno, maybe I'm talking out of my ass, here. For all we know, Linus' bottom line is that the same OS works on both smartphones and desktops.

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"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee

Re:first by adolf · 2013-06-09 20:09 · Score: 2

I didn't bother talking about my 4-megabyte Linux forays because I thought it might sound cheeky. (I didn't graduate to X11 until I had 8MB.)

And I'm here to tell you that sloppy programming costs billions of real-live dollars in hardware annually.

And everyone cares about their own pocketbook.

Put that in your rapid-development pipe and smoke it.

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Kid-proof tablet..

Re:first by tconnors · 2013-06-09 20:33 · Score: 2

When RAM is plentiful and cheap and even your average smartphone has more than 1GB of RAM are you sacrificing anything by only using a few MB of RAM instead of GBs?

Your *average* smartphone? I don't choose to throw out a perfectly workable smartphone Every Damn Year, so my year old phone only has 384MB of RAM. It still works, but some modern apps that add glitz at the expense of functionality are becoming seriously painful on it.

You sir, are what is wrong with the planet today. Too many teenage developer weenies that are so abstracted away from the machine that they've forgotten how to program efficiently. "Oh, but I need all that RAM to make my program cache things so it can be quicker". So why is it so much slower to fire up a pdf viewer on my phone with 384MB of RAM than what it was to fire up on my 12 year old laptop with 128MB of RAM?

All of my machines are maxed out. All of our rackfulls of ESXi servers at work are maxed out. Adding more RAM is not *easy*. Making devs do their jobs would be easier.

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