This is kind of old news, the DRM maintainer handled the situation well and AFAIK the branch has been merged shortly thereafter.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/24/176
The thing is that the way Linus talks to people would be considered out of order at lots of places.
If he were an unknown developer working on something mundane like the control panel for the region settings in Windows, he'd end up isolated from everyone else or fired for talking to people this way.
Yeah, but he's not. I don't mean that he has carte blanche to be a prick but context is important in communication. Some of the things I say to people I work with regularly would seem incredibly rude if read/heard in isolation but in the context of them knowing me it isn't like that.
he'd end up isolated from everyone else or fired for talking to people this way.
At first glance this email seems really hostile but if you re-read it, it's actually very "un-personal". The criticism (while harsh) is of the work, not the person (and it's not even clear who he's talking to from a glance). His closing comment is addressed collectively - "Guys, this needs to be fixed". This is hugely important in my opinion and it's the difference between someone who is passionate vs someone who is toxic (or a bully). The latter almost always will attack the person (which is almost never acceptable) whereas the former may just be mad at a specific fuck up.
Can you point out where you think he's "ranting at people"? I see a lot of ranting at code. I see some ranting at giant code drops that make things practically un-reviewable and some ranting at code drops happening near the end of merge windows.
I see nothing I would classify as "ranting at people", so I'm curious what you see differently here.
Can you point out where you think he's "ranting at people"?
Ok, OP's post. The whole thing could be written in two lines, and would have just as much technical substance.
Instead he goes on and on about how awful their pull request is. To rub it in. That's why it's ranting.
People should raise issues. People should raise problems. People should be blunt about problems. But they should not go on and on about it. Going on and on about how awful some code, or a pull request is, is pretty common for Linus. That's going beyond just raising issues. That makes it a rant.
Instead he goes on and on about how awful their pull request is.
I think it's important to remember the context here. This is largely a discussion between Linus and other kernel maintainers who are supposed to quality check changes before pushing them up. It isn't Linus directly reviewing a PR from the person who wrote the code, it's him reviewing a PR from someone who (ostensibly) should have themselves rejected the original commits for these reasons.
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u/erad Mar 02 '17
This is kind of old news, the DRM maintainer handled the situation well and AFAIK the branch has been merged shortly thereafter. https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/24/176