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Comment by nobleach | Hacker News Reader

I get that folks love a good Linus rant. But as someone who's been at the end of that style of "feedback", nothing can be more humiliating or demotivating. Certainly there are contributors that are making "rookie mistakes". There are folks that aren't willing to ingest the entire context of what was tried back in 2.0.36, 2.2, 2.4... etc. And perhaps it's wise to simply stay away until you're completely certain you've got the chops to contribute. More than half the folks that enjoy that sort of abuse don't have those chops.

I can defend someone who is unwilling to yield on quality. Afterall, this truly is his baby. Issuing scathing rebukes to well-intentioned contributors is like slapping my kid when he brings me the wrong type of screwdriver.

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I don't think a Linus rant ever hit anyone that was a rookie, they are always AFAIK against people "who should know better". Veteran developers, with multiple commits merged.

> scathing rebukes

Would you be able to point one out?

> to well-intentioned contributors

This is a system used and relied upon by billions of people around the world. Your intentions, while good, are not material to the problem. Put another way we have an endless supply of people with "good intentions" but we don't enjoy the same largess of people with "good skills."

https://lwn.net/Articles/343828/ describes Alan Cox trying to fix the TTY layer, being trashed by Linus, and removing himself from the maintainer page.

I find it hard to call this a "scathing rebuke:"

https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/373

It also didn't just happen out of the blue. It's also true that Alan had already been working on the kernel for 15 years, was an employee of RedHat at the time, and his Wife's health was starting to fail.

If you follow the thread it goes back and forth across quite a few messages with frustration building on both sides with Alan ultimately deciding to step away from a single (and very hairy) subsystem.

Not as scathing as some but recent

https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-=wiLdmz92CCfu2+-9_UrGSn6Pu6...

If you're at the level of delivering to Linus, I'm sorry but humiliation and demotivation are earned.

You don't talk like this to junior or even senior engineers, but you do reach a level at which gently telling isn't necessary.

If you don't like it go fork Linux and try being the nice benevolent dictator and we'll applaud your success.

Code quality does not care about your feelings.

No, but code quality can suffer if you piss off all the competent people and they leave

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