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Comment by livingparadox | Hacker News Reader

Since the author of the article decided to invoke Linus, I thought I'd see what Linus thought about the merge vs rebase debate.

http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/...

Turns out Linus also agrees with drunken_thor, that merge messages are useful. Suppose that's why Linus added merges in the first place. ;)

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His answer there on this topic boils down to “tell the patch author that they made a mistake, and steadfastly refuse to do anything with it yourself until the patch author does fix it”. This is the whole point of this article—that is simply not pragmatic; you can have changes made that aren’t quite perfect but where the original user is not willing to make the changes you require. It being abandoned in imperfect state, Linus’s answer is actually ignore it.

Linus' situation is that his ability to handle incoming contributions is a real bottleneck. In that case it is worthwhile to say, "Make my life easy or I ignore you." And because people want their stuff in his project, they do wind up making his life easy.

Most open source maintainers are not in that position.

Yeah, I agree Linus takes things too far at times. My response was mostly because the author's "this is the way Linus would have done it" stuff. I do agree that we should be willing to do a little cleanup ourselves when feasible. But I disagree with the author that we should edit /somebody else's commits/.

Well, quoting from that message, "If it's not ready, you send patches around". I think the big difference is that I'm willing to take patches that aren't ready and get them ready, whereas I'm sure Linus usually pushes back on the contributor to clean up their stuff. And I do think merges are super useful in a lot of cases, but Linus added `git am` too, and I like using all the tools at my disposal when they fit.

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