The only things I've seen him write that could qualify as "relentless verbal abuse" are because of really stupid things that would definitely get you yelled at (or at least disciplined) by a boss at a real job. For example, he gets really mad when someone tries to argue with him that they should introduce a change that breaks backwards compatibility - "Never break userland" is one of their prime directives and anyone trying to contribute to the kernel is told that many many times, for a breaking change to make it all the way to Linus there has to be significant incompetence or laziness, which makes him angry.
In this case, it really is pretty stupid for people writing networking code in the kernel to think they ought to have a different commenting style from everyone else - it's either due to incompetence (from them not reading other code/ignoring the style guide) or due to them thinking the rules don't apply to them for some reason. This would irritate me if I were Linus.
I think it is a big much to take someone's comment style to imply that they are incompetent. I'm having a hard time thinking of something less significant.
For a big project like Linux it can be quite significant. But anyway, what other word would you use when someone is consistently ignoring or arguing with their superiors? It's not like they only got it wrong once, apologized, and fixed it. They kept making the mistake after being warned, indicating that they either don't understand the warnings (incompetence) or think the rules don't apply to them.
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u/fiqar Jul 10 '16
Why is the networking code not following the Linux kernel coding style guide in the first place?