I don't do GitHub pull requests – Linus Torvalds

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?

(2012)

70 comments of past discussion, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26364697

9 further comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073974

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.