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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

I think people are arguing for two reasons:

1.) Linus is being a bully. There's a difference between speaking your mind openly and using rhetorical force to invalidate contrary views.

2.) The kernel requirements can be whatever those who control the kernel demand. That's just common sense. Making the leap to declaring that only one text wrapping approach is objectively correct is delusional.

If Linus simply said "The github pull request interface makes it impossible to follow the kernel commit guidelines, and we are not open to reconsidering those guidelines" there'd be no argument.

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IMO, the reason Linus is where he is today as an icon and at least some part of the reason we have a rock solid Linux to use across all our commercial and non-commercial projects is because Linus has strong opinions about how things should be.

Somehow, I don't know or have read about that many (if any) world-changing people, who also happen to be "so nice and understanding of others opinions" or "agrees to disagree".

I'm sorry, but there are indeed few ways to design a BMW and many ways to design a glob of metal that can't even move.

2. He clearly stated his reasons why his text wrapping approach is objectively superior (not correct). If you think he's delusional, point out the criterion he has failed to consider, or explain how some other system meets any of his criteria better.

In response to the pull request he did simply say "I don't do github pull requests." and explained why, and basically said he would if github supported commit messages in the appropriate style. He never insulted the pull requester. He called whoever is this "Joseph" person a moron, and now we have no idea why.

Apparently "Joseph" deleted his comment (very un-git-like of GitHub to make deleting a comment without a trace so easy). I checked all the other participants above where "Joseph" posted and found a Dan, but no Joseph.

Reddit[1] found the "Joseph" in question, his comments are still visible in his public activity stream: https://github.com/pirtlj

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

Thanks, good find!

So, if @pirtlj said that in response to Linus's first comment, then he was way out of line, and something should have been said. Maybe Linus didn't say the exact right thing, but I doubt I would have been able to say much better. Hopefully @pirtlj learned more than that he shouldn't have said anything (although even that would be a good thing, I think)

Joseph said something snarky along the lines of "Oh I'm Linus Torvalds, I'm always right" -- I think Linus was overreacting, but he was at least a little justified. He seems to get very angry when people state anything more than what's based on "facts."

The idea that one text wrapping approach is objectively superior for all purposes is incoherent. By that I mean it is an impossible claim given our most accurate understanding of epistemology.

Did he say it was for 'all purposes'? He said 50 characters for the first line is ideal for shortlogs, and 72 characters for more verbose logs, etc, when viewed in a terminal. He also said that encoding word wrap at write-time is better because only the author knows how to appropriately wrap. As he said, sometimes lines go longer, if the commit message includes program output that shouldn't be altered. So, you can't relegate word wrapping to the presentation layer without an unreasonably smart algorithm.

I interpret his statements to mean that the git/kernel projects' commit message standards are objectively better on all the ways we know how to measure (or at least, for all of the most common ways of looking at commit messages). So again, if you want to disagree, your choices are to point out a criterion that is not being considered, or how this system is not better at a known criterion.

I don't think his goal is to have no arguments. His goal seems to be "fix this issue, god damn it!" And amusing rant can help bring attention to the issue (note tomayko comment in the original thread). I don't know about you, but the rant is entertaining to me.

My take from that message is he doesn't care if they fix it or not, but rather he won't be doing pull requests in it's current state.

Linus certainly cares. Otherwise he wouldn't tell github about it:

> 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.

Contrary views like "Linus's shit doesn't stink"?

Actually, I think Linus was factually correct. The persons involved were morons. :-)

"using rhetorical force to invalidate contrary views"

Thank you for epitomizing what makes Linus worth emulating.

Rhetorical force. Coooool.

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