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Comment by mi100hael | Hacker News Reader

There's also Linus's personal aversion to how GitHub implements many opinionated workflows.

    > I don't do github pull requests.
    >
    > github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a
    > valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is
    > also deficient and useless.
    >  
    > Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github
    > instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version.
    > As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things. It's
    > fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit
    > editing, are just pure garbage.
    > 
    > I've told github people about my concerns, they didn't think they
    > mattered, so I gave up. Feel free to make a bugreport to github.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...

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He really talks in extremes. I see all his points but it doesn't make these things pure garbage.

Surely someone who talks like he does will never go anywhere in life!

Progress relies strongly on unreasonable people like Linus. Keep in mind that Github mutilated his baby so that's a pretty good reason to be upset.

Maybe, but solving truly big problems relies on people working together. Linus (and the unfortunate proliferation of jackasses who emulate him) do more to hinder progress than help it.

He solved the problem with git, he's upset that the company trying to make money off it broke it again.

Most of the times Linus is an asshole are completely justified. Being rude to groups like Nvidia isn't hindering progress.

I'm sure github has done more for git uptake than anyone else involved on the lkml or Linus himself. He should be thanking them for that.

He should only be thanking them for that if git uptake around a mutilated version of his tooling is something that Linus wants. I suspect very strongly that he doesn't want that. In fact, if GitHub were a less popular service he wouldn't need to spend nearly as much time dealing with people who don't RTFM and submit GitHub PRs despite Linus' objections to them.

> In fact, if GitHub were a less popular service he wouldn't need to spend nearly as much time dealing with people who don't RTFM and submit GitHub PRs despite Linus' objections to them.

Does he even bother reading them nowadays?

If anything, I would say that if git were less popular, its developers wouldn't have to deal with constant complaints that their UI scares noobs.

He doesn't read them. There is a bot for that now. Example: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/445#issuecomment-3203...

Why do you think he cares that anyone else besides Linux kernel developers use git?

Ehh, he solved his problem with git + mailing lists. That doesn't make it the same problem everyone else wants to solve.

Yeah? What's the problem you solved for yourself?

I don't much care whether Linus individually has the justification to be an asshole or not. The problem is that Linus being an asshole causes many other engineers to think it's ok/expected/encouraged to be assholes. All the non-assholes quietly disappear and we're left with a room full of assholes.

The whole "Linus is an asshole" is well overplayed, though. The guy's been developing Linux for 25 years, with most of his communications in the open. The kind of outburst he has once every few years, and which gets extensive coverage and discussion, is a weekly occurrence in many offices. It's just that we'll never hear of those.

And I've yet to see someone single out a particularly nice and constructive comment and use that for a counterpoint.

I suppose I'll bite:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/9/924

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/873

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/855

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/760

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/209

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/219

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/322

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/4/634

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/3/919

If you didn't notice from the dates, those are all (Literally all, I didn't leave any out) of Linus's emails from the past week or so. The only one that even really has a complaint in it is the ext4 one that you've likely already seen, and the rest are extremely helpful and include detailed descriptions of what he was thinking or what he'd like to see.

Seems like those people are just assholes trying to justify their behavior, anyone actually trying to emulate Linus would see thousands of helpful messages for every outburst.

I would like to think that Linux and Git have helped progress more than hinder it.

I'm curious - where do you think we would be today with the Linux kernel and git if Linus wasn't here?

Running on BSD and Mercurial? Wouldn't have made a lick of difference for most of us.

And yet, so many small and large organizations choose to use Linux and git over BSD and Mercurial, 'despite' Linus' management style.

If GitHub were based on Mercurial rather than git, we'd very likely see hg as the major VCS and git the lesser alternative. If FreeBSD weren't the target of a lawsuit in 1992 and 1993, it's plausible (by no means guaranteed) that it could have been the major OSS Unix distro instead of Linux.

Technology choices are largely driven by network effects, and small variances in the seeds of the networks can ultimately dictate which networks win and which ones lose.

Github rode on the back of widespread adoption of git, not the other way around. It isn't like Bitbucket didn't exist.

Progress relies strongly on people working together toward a common goal. If being "unreasonable" works for Linux, that's fine. But before others go trying to blindly emulate Linus, I'd suggest attempting to be reasonable first.

Nobody cares how reasonable you are if you don't actually produce anything.

And nobody cares how much you produce if you're too unreasonable to sell them on your creation. Creating strawmen out of maximally-extreme arguments is silly. Unless you think that being reasonable is mutually exclusive with being productive?

I think it's fair to say Linus has already proven his worth.

But even the Linux kernel and git aside, the fact that people listen to him despite his frankness speaks volumes for how respected he is.

Agreed, just as it would be a fallacy to presume that one can't be both productive and polite, it would also be a fallacy to believe that being impolite immediately invalidates all productive endeavors. I'm not using this thread to try to tear Linus down, just trying to keep people from promulgating the myth that Linus' governance style is the only effective one. :P

True, but irrelevant for Linus. It's not a good way to get ahead[1], but if you're already far enough ahead...

Personally, I think I'm on "your" side -- as it were -- on the side of civility, but sometimes you've just got to get shit done. Properly, which sometimes means shouting the right things at the right people[2].

I do think it's unreasonable of you to say that Linus is not "being reasonable", as you've clearly implied in your comment. To my mind he's being entirely reasonable, just not very "polite" or "civil" or whatever you want to call it.

[1] As in: Rise up the corporate ladder.

[2] Sorkin's "Too Big To Fail" was a big eye-opener in this regard, FWIW.

> I do think it's unreasonable of you to say that Linus is not "being reasonable", as you've clearly implied in your comment.

I'm literally using the terminology of the person that I'm trying to refute! :P If you want to argue phrasing, take that to jacquesm.

I'm sorry. I was too carried away to notice! :)

(Which reminds me: There should probably be some sort of mandatory-quoting mechanism on HN. It seems weird that you can snipe comments by editing at just the right time. That's not what happened in this case, I'm just saying that it would probably be a good thing to have measures against it. Sorry, that's my META-rant done.)

> And nobody cares how much you produce if you're too unreasonable to sell them on your creation.

But Linus already has.

What people really don't seem to get is that Linus' cultural background is Finnish, and that Finns tend to be extremely outspoken and that they couldn't lie or polish their words if their life depended on it.

http://www.karelia.fi/welcomingguide/the-finnish-way-of-life

What to American sensibilities are grave insults to Linus is most likely just him speaking his mind without any filter in place, the way he was brought up.

I'm aware of this, and I can respect differences attributable to different cultural norms. But firstly, I have spoken to a Finnish developer who has said that he also considers Linus more frustrating than average; secondly, acknowledging cultural differences creates a foundation for effective communication, but does not infallibly forgive any and all transgressions (context still matters); and thirdly, most other developers will not have the excuse of being Finnish, and so my suggestion to other developers to consider alternative approaches stands (i.e. blindly emulating Linus as an attempt to lead a software project makes as much sense as blindly emulating Steve Jobs in an attempt to lead a company).

Well, personally I prefer the 'Linus' approach rather than the politically correct avoid-the-language-of-conflict and make sure you dress up every insult as a compliment approach, but I can see why if you're not used to it it can be tough. Sure, Linus is an outlier, even by Finnish standards, but I'm willing to cut the guy some slack because of his contributions, I'd be less willing to cut someone slack who does not have the required merit badges and who just goes around insulting people for effect. Linus simply has a hard time feeling passionate about stuff he really cares about and expressing himself in a way that would not be frowned on at the boardroom level. It's a problem, but it's mostly his problem and I've yet to see others emulating him so if that's a huge problem I'm not presently aware of it (and I meet lots of developers).

> politically correct avoid-the-language-of-conflict and make sure you dress up every insult as a compliment

These are two extremes, and you can find a middle ground between them.

In particular, here's a middle ground from someone objecting to Linus for willfully breaking userspace because he didn't think backwards-compatibility was important (a thing that he flames others to a crisp for), in a way that clearly expressed objection but not insult: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/29/541

I'm sure if you go and sift through the incredible volume of product that Linus has made over the years you will find a few more examples of absolutely shocking behavior.

What's the last time someone did the opposite and searched for all the times when Linus was on his best behavior?

Have you considered the parallels with the Richelieu quote:

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. "

Linus has written far more than six lines and I'm sure you'll be able to do a stellar job of hanging him. But you're going to have to consider whether your ability hinges on Linus' perceived personality or on the volume of his communications and product.

That's a fair point, and I am really curious to see all the times he was on his best behavior now. :)

But I think it's a little weakened by the fact that Linus doesn't think that his poorest behavior was actually poor or indefensible; if pressed he says it's exactly what he should have done.

As a good counterexample involving a developer of another kernel, I once mentioned 'bcantrill making a personal attack on the Solaris development list in the midst of a technical argument in 1996, and he found the HN thread and replied to me with an unambiguous apology, despite it being almost twenty years later and him doubtless being a different person now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040602

Even the smallest sign that Linus genuinely thinks the behavior was suboptimal (not a "I want you people to stop complaining," which is basically what the Code of Conflict was) would go a long way towards changing everyone's perception of his behavior. But he's standing by the six lines.

Agreed, Linus doesn't see it as a problem. But that's his right no? I think he only cares about one thing: to get the job done. I don't think he cares one bit about how people perceive him and I suspect that his words in written form come across a lot harsher than they would have been if they were spoken in person and in a room with just a handful of people rather than online and visible to all the world and archived for eternity.

You can prefer it all you want, but your opinion is unreasonable, and there's simply no justification for it.

...see? You can be direct, even uncompromising and arrogant, without being abusive.

Cultural differences aren't enough to explain away his open hostility to so many things and people.

To quote from the original comment in this thread:

>You're a moron.

I don't believe the Finnish mentality justifies being so aggressive - and if it does, I'd better stay a long way away from Finland, which is clearly an awful place to live.

> To quote from the original comment in this thread:

> >You're a moron.

> I don't believe the Finnish mentality justifies being so aggressive

A previous Hackernews thread referred to a reddit thread that found the now deleted comment that Linus responded to [1] [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3962978

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/tionj/linus_tor...

That's not a very good excuse for someone who's communicating with other people outside of his culture. He's had many many years to learn that his style of communication doesn't mesh with most people.

> He's had many many years to learn that his style of communication doesn't mesh with most people.

Well, considering that Linux is pretty much powering the world it seems to me that his style of communication tends to mesh perfectly well with the people that he's working with and that they actually get the job done. As opposed to a whole pile of floundering competitors which are of course much better from a technical perspective and tend to have more polite maintainers.

The man gets the job done, in a similar way that an army general will get the job done. Whether he would be equally effective if he would polish his words on those occasions where people get offended is something we probably will not know.

If you're easily offended don't contribute to the Linux kernel.

He surrounds himself with people that are willing to put up with his communication style. That doesn't mean he has a good communication style.

> If you're easily offended don't contribute to the Linux kernel.

That's a pretty shitty attitude to take. And you don't have to be "easily offended" to dislike interacting with Linus.

> That's a pretty shitty attitude to take.

Why?

The Linux kernel is mission critical, that means that tons of business and individual depend on it for all kinds of stuff that if it went down would be a major event with the losses likely hard to put a figure on.

Developing for such an environment tends to be a fairly harsh affair, Linus was not bred for this, he more or less accidentally found himself the leader of a substantial software effect, the likes of which had not been seen before outside of very large corporations. The fact that he managed to make this work and managed to get together a band of developers that work well with him - regardless of style - speaks volumes to me, I know I couldn't do it, work the best part of my life to give away my work and to be scolded for the form of my delivery would be reason enough for me to throw the towel in.

Personally, I've known bosses that were a lot less reasonable than Linus is who tends to simply be direct, to the point and sometimes (rare enough that people feel the need to point out their favorites) makes social faux-pas that I feel are minor issues, stuff that if it is part of someone's personality you can easily step over.

I've yet to be in a work environment where there aren't one or two 'hard cases' and typically they have their reasons for being short tempered, such as that when the shit hits the fan it is their shoulders that a disproportionate helping of manure will land on.

Being the maintainer of a large open source project has to among the the most thankless jobs in the world, being the chief maintainer of the Linux kernel is probably one of the worst of those.

The only other person in the open source community that gets such treatment is RMS and I really fail to see what the big deal is.

Correlation is not causation. Just because Linus managed to become BDFL of a hugely successful project doesn't mean Linus's communication style in any way caused this. And it doesn't mean that he should get a free pass on treating people badly.

A lot of people subscribe to the idea that if you don't have a thick skin you shouldn't be in tech. That's a terrible attitude to take, there's absolutely no reason why that should be true, and it discriminates against a lot of people (including women). This attitude just contributes to the current toxic tech culture.

> Correlation is not causation. Just because Linus managed to become BDFL of a hugely successful project doesn't mean Linus's communication style in any way caused this.

Just as it does not prove the opposite.

> And it doesn't mean that he should get a free pass on treating people badly.

From you? Or from those people?

If you're not the one that he was talking to why do you feel so strongly about it?

> A lot of people subscribe to the idea that if you don't have a thick skin you shouldn't be in tech.

I didn't say that. And I don't subscribe to that. But if you want to be in a project with a BDFL that tends to be a bit coarse then it certainly won't hurt.

> That's a terrible attitude to take, there's absolutely no reason why that should be true, and it discriminates against a lot of people (including women). This attitude just contributes to the current toxic tech culture.

Yes it would. But that is something that you mixed in all by yourself and you're making Linus the scapegoat for this particular shortcoming of the tech community, whereas Linus is just one person in an arguably un-enviable position who gets a lot of shit thrown at him for a few minor gaffes which the participants took a lot better than the bystanders. And personally I'm more inclined to see these as in the heat of the moment and soon forgotten afterwards, the fact that they are archived forever doesn't take away the dynamics of the original situation. Heck, if I got the kind of hate that Linus gets for his occasional flare-up I'd stick to solo projects. It's bordering on the ridiculous how this is pulled out of proportion.

and it discriminates against a lot of people (including women).

My assumption is you aren't a woman, but I thought I would stop in and ask if you are. If you aren't, what is the basis for your idea that his communication style would discriminate against women?

>And you don't have to be "easily offended" to dislike interacting with Linus.

If you don't do something because of a personal dislike, and expect others to cater to your culture and personal preferences, then the problem is you.

I've yet to work for a company where there wasn't some people I personally disliked working with. part of being professional is putting aside things like dislike and focusing on the core mission/goals and finding ways to work together despite how you feel.

Those that CANNOT work with linux I would say are those that are easily offended. Some may choose not to, but that is their own personal choice.

Most people _where_? In the USA or the whole world? What makes you think that USA is a better representative of the world culture than Finland? I'd be hard pressed to recall any place in the world where people hate Finns, while that can't be said about Americans...

Torvaldes is not proud of his behavior, https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_lin...

Which to me makes it even less of an issue.

For me, the video suggests Torvalde's communication style is less a matter of culture than individuality. That he is not proud of it seems missing from the caricaturizations of it used rhetorically.

> The Finnish language lacks a specific word for "please"

Now I see where the Klingon language drew some of its inspiration. :D

No, progress often relies on both those things-- people working reasonably together on ideas brought forward by people who might be deemed "unreasonable."

Progress also requires a common standard. Linux is not unreasonable, it just has its own standards.

Things that don't conform to that standard are 'garbage' or are simply in other words 'non compliant'. Linus could express all the same ideas without profanity, if people cared about quality as much as he does.

Strictly enforcing some compliance to their developing process doesn't make Linux development 'unreasonable', because trying to change their developing process just because of some external web tool doesn't constitute 'reasoning'.

Trying to change their development process is just fire and motion ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ ) from a third party.

Progress relies strongly on strong-willed people whose strong opinions are going in the direction of progress.

I doubt you will find many people who think that the state of GitHub PRs today represents less progress than the state of the `git request-pull` workflow. And, to be clear, there are a lot of things I prefer about `git request-pull`, starting with the ability to provide inline commentary on the commit message itself. But it's clear that GitHub has built a better product that keeps improving and has enabled a lot of teams to successfully build their own software. `git request-pull` is easily available to anyone with email, and I use it myself when there's no PR interface for a git repo, but people still tend to prefer the GitHub-style workflow.

Github also created the most productive (set of) open source communities ever around "his" baby.

Seriously: Everyone calling Github "garbage" should be forced to use sourceforge until they're willing to reconsider. Or Bugzilla. Or trac. Or whatever it is that ubuntu is using to make it impossible to ever find anything.

I don't see why you deem Trac worse than GitHub for helping a project.

but muh bootstrap

https://github.com/rmccue/not-trac

I remember Trac, just browsing Trac instances was terrible.

But "whatever it is that ubuntu is using" — Launchpad — was pretty awesome. I used bzr before git, and I really liked Launchpad.

I wouldn't say he is unreasonable.

He is firm, strongly opinionated, and doesn't waste time catering to irrelevant feelings. That isn't "unreasonable", more "difficult" in my mind as far as personal interaction goes.

His actual opinions are usually very reasonable, just not communicated in ways that come across as such. At least in my opinion

The comment was also made over 5 years ago. GitHub PRs have improved since then, though he may still find them deficient.

> He really talks in extremes. I see all his points but it doesn't make these things pure garbage.

Why, from his point of view - if GH lacks functionality he needs and git proper delivers this functionality in conjunction with email, GH is just about as useful as an empty beer can ;)

But sure, outsiders with zero idea of what is being discussed love to take his words out of context and derive all sorts of bizarre conclusions.

He doesn't qualify his statements, though. In my view, one of the most offputting parts of the nerd worldview is "I don't like it therefore it's shit". This juvenile lack of empathy is at the root of a lot of conflict (and the reason many people leave tech).

> He really talks in extremes.

Easiest way to herd cats on a mailing list.

> I see all his points but it doesn't make these things pure garbage.

Well.. you see his points and his opinion. People are always in a hurry to take affront to this, but really, he's just putting the argument where it's ultimately going to end up anyways, and in the process, he gets to avoid the dozens of follow-up emails that fruitlessly attempt to convince him out of this opinion.

You're really only left with two options, disagree and move on, or fix the problems he has with it and try to get him to use it again later.

Linus has a very successful project, he put in a lot of hard graft to get his project where it is, he continues to put a lot of hard graft, and he has a very limited amount of time. We can ask him to sugar coat his communications, so had not to ruffle too many feathers, or we can ask him to churn out as much techinical work as possible. I think we're asking him to churn out as much technical work as possible, so therefore he is optimising against that and his communications with humans are going to be terse. Maybe we need intermediaries to assist him in managing his communications, but then we loose direct access, so ultimately there has to be compromise.

There is always compromise. We can ask Linus to compromise, or we can. Are his inputs better put in at a technical level or at a human touchy-feelie level? What do you think is the best use of Linus' time?

It is incredibly easy to offer criticism, but very much more difficult to offer real and implementable solutions.

It's not pure garbage, but it's not workable for Linus. Nothing wrong with that. Also, he's right in this case.

Mobile friendly:

> I don't do github pull requests.

> github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is also deficient and useless.

> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things. It's fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage.

> I've told github people about my concerns, they didn't think they mattered, so I gave up. Feel free to make a bugreport to github.

It looks like github's pull requests and other features Linus had problems with have improved since 2012. Here is a pull request that Linus opened recently:

https://github.com/Subsurface-divelog/libdc/pull/7

None of those commits are signed. Apparently people on GitHub can commit as torvalds if the author email matches his: https://github.com/amoffat/masquerade/commit/9b0562595cc479a...

(You can't fake a fork without hacking the torvalds account, though, so maybe it really was him.)

Subsurface was originally created by Linus. Its pretty likely that that he authored those commits.

> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module,

Can anybody explain a little more about this module? I thought 'pull request' is Github only.

Also, should it really be called merge request? What exactly are they pulling during the merge?

They're pulling changes from another repository. A pull request is a request for someone else (the maintainer) to pull the changes that you're submitting into their repo. You aren't pushing; you're requesting for them to pull.

GitLab apparently does call them merge requests, though.

Github calls it pull, even if it's within the same repo, but from different branch. It essentially is a merge anyway.

You are pulling the commits from another repository.

The base repository is behind the forked repository and the forker is asking the base to incorporate (pull) the changes (commits).

Why does it need to focus on who is doing it? I think merge is generic enough term that can describe both actors (i.e. if you for example have a right to write into upstream, you can merge it yourself, without asking the primary owner.

Because otherwise it wouldn't work.

You'd run "git format-patch" to create a .patch file with the diff of changes for a commit, and then run "git send-email" to send an email with the patch as the contents (optionally with additional comments). The recipient can then run "git apply" to apply the patches to their tree and push the changes.

For "private" repos, the recipient would be a specific repo maintainer/owner. For "public" repos like the Linux kernel, the recipient is usually a publicly-archived mailing list.

It's known as git request-pull [1]. The generated text would have to be sent to the ones you would want to pull from the repository you host.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-request...

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