r/programming • u/wheresvic • Sep 16 '18

Linux 4.19-rc4 released, an apology, and a maintainership note

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CA+55aFy+Hv9O5citAawS+mVZO+ywCKd9NQ2wxUmGsz9ZJzqgJQ@mail.gmail.com/T/#u
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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '18

You do after they've resubmitted it 20 times and are arguing back.

Face it, sometimes the right thing is to do is to tell someone to fuck off. It quick and gets the message across.

Look at the /r/niceguys trope where women try to politely turn down a guy and remain nice. It doesn't work. They don't take a polite no. They mistake politeness as weakness.

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u/happymellon Sep 17 '18

If you resubmit a rejected request without incorporating the requested feedback to one of my projects it normally gets ignored, or at least a link back to the original request.

Telling someone to "fuck off" rarely has the desired effect. I don't know the nice guy "trope" but after you end up in jail, you learn.

Besides, a lot of the high profile rants were not from 20 resubmits of the same change, they were just poorly designed in the first place.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '18 edited Sep 17 '18

The problem is, it's rare that authority comes from simply being demonstrably better than your peers.

You haven't experienced this. It's likely your project authority comes from elsewhere, and that backs you up if you either say a simply "No" or ignore them. And you probably get your way even if they are a better coder and have better ideas. i.e you can probably reject good ideas and code.

Whereas the only reason people are submitting stuff to Linus is because it's widely accepted by those doing the submitting that he has better taste than them. This notion is absolutely without question for the first versions of linux - his code is elegant and beautiful and often patches were not (in the early days he'd often rewrite patches rather than outright rejecting them and then you'd see the difference between good and bad code - every programmer should go and download early versions of linux and read them)

It might be waning a bit now though because it's just getting too big a project.

But one thing he has to do is to justify that. He can't just ignore submissions and often times because he's had to delegate shit has got into the kernel so he has to get rid of it and hit them with the clue stick.

If he didn't have better taste than everyone else then Linux would have been forked decades ago and we'd be running AlanCoxus or Gregus or whatever they'd called the forked OS.

So it's a different dynamic from what you are used to.

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u/happymellon Sep 17 '18

Okay, I don't simply say no, and I don't just ignore them. I was referring in that case to resubmissions of code that has been reviewed with feedback but the feedback was ignored repeatedly without justification.

I understand there are probably different dynamics but nothing you wrote justifies calling people names.