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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

In terms of evolution through the donation and acceptance of information carrying material, the most bizarre ritual I have witnessed is that of Developa Linuxia:

  git format-patch --stdout | mail

  ... | git am

It is recommended that this be seen in the wild. The beasts that exchange material this way are rare and ancient but we are fortunate that it is easy to observe them performing their rites. They make a point of enacting them publicly, in open clearings know as mailing lists. You will note that, in comparison to more evolved techniques, what first seems like clumsy fumbling takes on a primal beauty of its own.

These creatures are aware of more modern practices and yet they choose to remain in their own evolutionary niche, in part, because they lament the way in which Developa intercourse has been cheapened and corrupted by an unmentionable website named “something”hub.com.

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And the real miracle of nature is all that is hidden in "dot dot dot". See "Mama Mia" by Abba et al for more information.

Read in the voice of David Attenborough.

Is this a GPT3 post? made zero sense

It's a highly geeky joke about the Linux kernel development process, which is quite antiquated.

Which is to its credit, compared to node hell.

There are steps in between, no need to jump from extreme to extreme.

And there's a reason there is no company worth its salt, no matter the scale, that still works by sending patches by email.

Hogwash. Email for the LKML is the equiv of a daily standup, or walking over to someone's desk.

It's pre-commit. A way to work out if it gets into git, or what not.

But of course, if something has worked well for decades, and continues to work well, that's meaningless.

There's no company that operates at a scale comparable to the Linux kernel and still has a single individual taking the final call about merging code into trunk.

Linux kernel development works perfectly well using mailing lists. The fact that it discourages people who can't bother spending 15 minutes to learn how to send a patch is a feature, not a bug.

I'm willing to bet that once the current generation of top level Linux hackers retires, Linux development will be reformed.

Is it “extreme” because it’s antiquated? If so, how do you distinguish between antiquated-and-bad versus proven-and-robust.

To explain the joke..

"donation and acceptance of information carrying material" = a high-enough abstraction to cover both sex and development of the Linux Kernel.

"git format-patch --stdout | mail" = creates a patch (a series of commits wrapped neatly) in std-out and then pipes that into the computer's mail client

"... | git am" = the receiver pipes that information into git which then applies the commits

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