I don't do GitHub pull requests – Linus Torvalds

7 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by Fiveplus

6 Comments

SkiFire13

8 hours ago

I can agree that Github is not particularly great for someone used to the original git pull requests, but I'm intrigued by this note:

> no sane word-wrap of the long description you type: github commit > messages tend to be (if they have any description at all) one long > unreadable line.

Why does word wrapping need to be a concern of those writing the message rather than the software showing it to the reader? I generally find them to be too short on big screens while being too big for small phone screens. They are also a pain to write manually if you ever have to go back and perform a substantial edit in the middle of a paragraph; one could argue your editor could help you with that, but if I need a software to do this anyway why can't that be used on the viewer side, where they can also customize settings as they see fit without annoying other people?

wvbdmp

9 hours ago

Is some kind of smear campaign against Torvalds going on? For some reason I’ve been seeing a lot of this old stuff make the rounds. This one is actually quite harsh (the “moron” bit) and I don’t particularly agree with the hard-wrapping, but I detest the indignation and moral panic that invariably follows… I also detested it back then, but it’s especially disgusting now that he’s mellowed out a bit.

jeffrallen

9 hours ago

Torvalds does not really need any help from a smear campaign to come off as abrasive. He is as he is, one of a multitude of different kinds of engineers (indeed, people) one can find I the real world.

wvbdmp

2 hours ago

Sure, but digging up 13 year old stuff still smacks of intention and I generally find it distasteful. What good-faith reading should we apply to this submission? It’s not like Torvalds is going around sweet-talking people into give him money or votes or attention or whatever, in which case I might see some merit in “exposing” him.

fuzzfactor

6 hours ago

>when those people with lower standards try to get their commits included in the kernel, I will ridicule them and point out how broken their commit messages or pull requests are.

>Agreed?