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Linus Torvalds Says 'Buggy Crap' Made It Into Linux 4.8 (theregister.co.uk)
Two days after Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.8, he began apologizing for a bug fix gone bad. The Register reports: "I'm really sorry I applied that last series from Andrew just before doing the 4.8 release, because they cause problems, and now it is in 4.8 (and that buggy crap is marked for stable too)." The "crap" in question is an attempt to fix a bug that's been present in Linux since version 3.15. Torvalds rates the fix for that bug "clearly worse than the bug it tried to fix, since that original bug has never killed my machine!" Torvalds isn't happy with kernel contributor Andrew Morton, who he says is debugging with a known bad use of BUG_ON(). "I've ranted against people using BUG_ON() for debugging in the past. Why the f*ck does this still happen?" Torvalds writes, pointing to a 2002 post to the kernel mailing list outlining how to do BUG_ON() right. He later adds "so excuse me for being upset that people still do this shit almost 15 years later."
Overlord issues 'BUG_ON() considered harmful' edict 14 years ago and only now thinks about removing said anti-feature?
> I want to ... live a lifetime where everyone in the world is a moron compared to me.
You really don't. Dealing with morons is frustrating. When everyone is a moron (regarding the subject at hand), every interaction is frustrating.
I don't *excuse* Linus's temperament when it comes to kernel goofs, but I do understand it. There are a couple of very specific topics that I've studied and researched for decades. When I have discuss to those topics with people who have other specialties, and let them have input and make decisions that are within my realm of expertise but not theirs, it can be very frustrating. Because Linus is the expert on the Linux kernel, and he's a perfectionist, I understand it may get very frustrating to continually deal with mistakes that are, to him, stupid mistakes.
Linus isn't likely to invite you out for an ice cream cone to discuss a bug and your feelings about it but, he's right that it's a pretty bad bug (http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1610.0/00878.html). Luckily, the way kernel development works means that 99.9999% of users will never see this bug. No major distro has shipped this yet and by the time this kernel trickles down to users (if ever), the bug will be fixed.
I'd revoke all my posts in this thread to mark this up...
There's some good stuff in Linux. But damn it's an unreadable mess in so many places. I like looking at BSD based code because it is so often much more straight forward and easier to understand.
So where in the open source world are there regular code reviews with thought out discussions about how to write code better, how to follow the correct style guidelines, pointing out "oh by the way, you're using BUG_ON() the wrong way", and stuff like that?
The Corporate Fascists want a stable and predictable economy in which the rules are well understood and consistent. They also of course want anything they can get for free and also want a pony. Most of the Corporate Fascist Interests perfectly overlap with most of the population.
Obviously we need to be diligent in ensuring that they don't get everything they want for free but it's completely wrong to say that they prefer the buffoon to the crook. The "crook" is accused of storing a few documents that shouldn't have been stored in email. That doesn't really affect the stability of world markets or the predictability of society. In fact like 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the world, the Crook's emails don't affect them in the slightest. On the other hand a trade war with China would affect everybody including the Corporate Fascists' interests negatively.
If my choice is supporting corporate fascists or supporting anarchists I'll pick the corporate fascists any day. Corporate fascists interest far more often overlap with most of the population's self-interest. Rarely to anarchists' interests overlap with anyone else's since by definition they're only looking out for themselves.
The Corporate Fascists are like an ox. If you don't mind them they'll trample the crops and eat your food reserves. If you watch them and regulate them you can use them to plow your fields.
I do excuse it.
He is attacking the mistake of the person and not the person.
Taking such stuff personally is ridiculous, but I suppose it does give people something to talk about with something that's almost a non-issue.
Btw, I *am* the moron in kernel dev. My name is in the kernel changelog exactly once, which means I helped find and fix a problem when I had never done so before - I didn't know what the heck I was doing. Kernel development is very complex, with it's own set of rules quite different from userspace and I was in there trying to work on it, sending emails to the maintainer of the md subsystem (raid etc.) For anyone reading my emails or code, I was, compared to them, a moron. My flailing about might have been frustrating for them.
On the other hand, after almost 20 years I understand Linux pretty well from the userspace perspective, particularly the storage and security side of things. So when I'm in a meeting at work and the project manager wants to put certain files "on the C drive", when he wants to defrag and log in as Administrator, he becomes the moron and I'm the one getting frustrated.
Sure, an ideal software team is basically:
- 1-2 grumpy old guys who are mostly just trying to steer the project away from disaster.
- A couple guys a bit younger than that who are less jaded than the grumpy old guys but, kinda get where they are coming from and so genuinely think about the code they are writing.
- A couple of young guys that just finished a C++ book and enthusiastically want to use templates everywhere.
That's a software team that can get shit done. And, probably won't be using the excuse of "refactoring" to rewrite it in six months.