I admire Kees Cook's patience.
> you didn't coordinate with anyone. You didn't search lore for the warning strings, you didn't even check -next where you've now created merge conflicts. You put insufficiently tested patches into the tree at the last minute and cut an rc release that broke for everyone using GCC <15. You mercilessly flame maintainers for much much less.
Hypocrisy is an even worse trait than flaming people.
I remember Maddox on xmission having a page explaining that while he may make a grammatical error from time to time, he has published literally hundreds of thousands of words, and the average email he receives contains 10% errors.
However, Linus is well-known for being abrasive, abusive, call it what you want. If you can't take it, don't foist it, Linus. Even if you've earned the right, IMO.
Again, the only non-fictional people I know who qualify, are actually really nice to people.
Eh I mean everyone's a hypocrite if you dig deep enough—we're all a big nest of contradictions internally. Recognition of this and accountability is paramount though. He could have simply owned his mistake and swallowed his pride and this wouldn't have been such an issue.
You need to know what you support. If you are going to change, it must be planned somehow.
I find Torwalds reckless by changing his development environment before release. If he really needs that computer to release the kernel, it must be stable one. Even better: it should be a VM (hosted somewhere) or part of a CI-CD pipeline.
Not that I approve the untested changes, I'd have used a different gcc temporarily (container or whatever), but, yeah, well...
This is common best practice in many environments...
Linus surely knows this, but here he's just being hard headed.
This is super nice in theory, but it gets murky if you veer off the "I'm building current mainline Firefox path". For example, I'm a maintainer of a Firefox fork that often lags a few versions behind. It has substantial changes, and we are only two guys doing the major work, so keeping up with current changes is not feasible. However, this is a research/security testing-focused project, so this is generally okay.
However, coming back to the build issue, apparently, it's costly to host all those buildchain archives. So they get frequently deleted from the remote repository, which leads to the build only working on machines that downloaded the toolchain earlier (i.e., not Github action runner, for example).
Given that there are many more downstream users of effectively a ton of kernel versions, this quickly gets fairly expensive and takes up a ton of effort unless you pin it to some old version and rarely change it.
So, as someone wanting to mess around with open source projects, their supporting more than 1 specific compiler version is actually quite nice.
The insanity is that the Kernel, Fedora and GCC are so badly coordinated that the beta of the compiler breaks the Kernel build (this is not a beta, this is a pre-alpha in a reasonable universe...is the Kernel a critical user of GCC? Apparently not), and a major distro packages that beta version of the compiler.
To borrow a phrase from Reddit: "everybody sucks here" (even Cook, who looks the best of everyone here, seems either oblivious or defeated about how clownshoes it is that released versions of major linux distros can't build the Kernel. The solution of "don't update to release versions" is crap).
(Writing this from a Linux machine, which I will continue using, but also sort of despise).
Compilers will be updated, they will have new warnings, this has happened numerous times and will happen in the future. The linux kernel has always supported a wide range of compiler versions, from the very latest to 5+ years old.
I've ranted about "-Werror" in the past, but to try to keep it concise: it breaks builds that would and should otherwise work. It breaks older code with newer compiler and different-platform compiler. This is bad because then you can't, say, use the exact code specified/intended without modifications, or you can't test and compare different versions or different toolchains, etc. A good developer will absolutely not tolerate a deluge of warnings all the time, they will decide to fix the warnings to get a clean build, over a reasonable time with well-considered changes, rather than be forced to fix them immediately with brash disruptive code changes. And this is a perfect example why. New compiler fine, new warnings fine. Warnings are a useful feature, distinct from errors. "-Werror" is the real error.
Linux decided, on a whim, that a pre-release of GCC 15 ought to suddenly be a compiler that the Linux project officially uses, and threw in some last-minute commits straight to main, which is insane. But even without -Werror, when the project decides to upgrade compiler versions, warnings must be silenced, either through disabling new warnings or through changing the source code. Warnings have value, and they only have value if they're not routinely ignored.
For the record, I agree that -Werror sucks. It's nice in CI, but it's terrible to have it enabled by default, as it means that your contributors will have their build broken just because they used a different compiler version than the ones which the project has decided to officially adopt. But I don't think it's the problem here. The problem here is Linus's sudden decision to upgrade to a pre-release version of GCC which has new warnings and commit "fixes" straight to main.
But pushing breaking changes just to suppress some new warning should not be the alternative. Working to minimize warnings in a pragmatic way seems more tenable.
Whereas in a lot of the C (and C++, and even older Python) codebases I've seen, these sorts of dependencies aren't locked to the same extent, so it's harder to track upgrades, and therefore warnings are more likely to appear, well without warning.
But I think it's also probably the case that a C expert will produce codebases that have no warnings, and a C novice will produce codebases filled with warnings, and the same for JS. So I can imagine if you're just "visiting" the other language's ecosystem, you'll see worse projects and results than if you've spent a while there.
And reverted them as soon as the issue became apparent.
> then flames the maintainer who was working on cleanly updating the kernel for the not-yet-released compiler?
Talking aboutchanges that he had not pushed by the time Linus published the release candidate.
Also the "not yet released" seems to be a red herring, as the article notes having beta versions of compilers in new releases is a tradition for some distros, so that should not be unexpected. It makes some sense since distros tend to stick to a compiler for each elease, so shipping a soon to be out of maintenance compiler from day one will only cause other issues down the road.
That's just not what Fedora is, though. Being on the bleeding edge is foundational to Fedora, even if it's sometimes inconvenient. If you want battle-tested and stable, don't run Fedora, but use Debian or something.