Re: Linus is on a powertrip..

kwrohrer@ce.mediaone.net
Tue, 29 Sep 1998 18:48:01 -0500 (CDT)

And lo, Aaron Tiensivu saith unto me:
>
> > This is _exactly_ the same thing that made me hate vger when it came to
> > networking patches. And I'm going to ask David once again to just shut
> > vger down, because these problems keep on happening.
> >
> > Linus
>
> You do realize that your powertrip lately is really hurting Linux development.
Linus is, and has always been, the undisputed final sanity check on what
goes into the main Linux kernel. Yes this is power, but he doesn't seem
to be tripping on it at the moment. He is complaining (and rightfully
so) that patches in vger are not being sent to him in a sane, intelligible
form, and that people are blaming him for not having the time (and sanity)
for integrating them anyway. It's people who find problems, understand
them well enough to write a patch, and DON'T BRING IT TO LINUS, that are
holding Linux back, if anyone...and I somehow doubt Linus would want
to call the current CVS snapshot "Linux 2.2.0" anyway, so that "if" goes
double.

> Linux has been getting a bunch of good press lately (finally) but if this
> ego/head-in-sand/etc trend continues.. 2.2 will never go out the door and we'll
> have this buggy heap called 2.1 still around.
If people who submitted patches to vger would submit them to Linus as well,
with some semblance of explanation, then he would be able to understand and
integrate them. "Ego" trip or no, Linus is the undisputed final sanity
check on patches going into the mainstream kernel, and he just doesn't
have the time (or sanity :-)) to handle huge anonymous patches arising
from infrequent syncing with vger.

> 2.1 has been drawn out too long
> and people are bailing ship left and right over stupid arguements.
While both of these may be true, you haven't shown causality here...or in
the next sentence, either.

> Jitterbug flopped.. vger is now flopping.. you've already lost some damn good
> IDE coders, and I'm sure you're going to lose more at this rate.
The IDE dispute had nothing to do with CVS repositories being expected to
magically convey patches with explanations through Linus straight to the
mainstream kernel, or with people complaining when such magical conveyance
failed to happen.

> I hate writing a message sounding like this but I think it should be said.
The vger CVS repository is/was good when used as a place to send patches
which had either already been sent to Linus or needed wider testing,
a sort of "unstable unstable" kernel if you will. But if this was ever a
stated ideal, nobody publicized it, or people forgot it too aggressively.
If we really want a 2.2 kernel, people need to get disentangled, digested
patches to Linus, and it's much more efficient for the patchers (who know
the subsystem and the reasoning) to do so than Linus himself...

Keith (somewhere in vger: #define HZ 1000000? maybe...)

-- 
"The avalanche has already started; |Linux: http://www.linuxhq.com     |"Zooty,
it is too late for the pebbles to   |KDE:   http://www.kde.org         | zoot
vote." Kosh, "Believers", Babylon 5 |Keith: kwrohrer@enteract.com      | zoot!"
 www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html |http://www.enteract.com/~kwrohrer | --Rebo


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