Apologies for breaking the threading - adding the necessary headers
manually into Netscape mailer is defeating me.
esr wrote:
> I think it would help matters all around if there were a web page
somewhere
> listing pending patches and even as little as a one-line comment from
you
> as to where they are in the integration process. It might even help
you
> organize your own work better.
It's interesting that many people - including Eric - seem to have an
implicit belief that Internet technology, in one form or another, holds
the solution to the problem at hand. Web pending patch lists,
jitterbug, development CVS trees, hierarchical distributed weighted
voting patch scoring systems, whatever. And perhaps they do, but all
blind assumptions are worth questioning.
I hope it's not too controversial to hypothesize that Linus is under
heavy pressure, and that evidence of this is starting to show. One
symptom is lack of responsiveness to patches, which some people are
complaining about violently. But Linus's comments indicate that this
is because now he has to think long and hard about every change.
He presumably then needs to reject a lot more changes. The Right Thing
is a lot less obvious than it was a couple of years ago, and is perhaps
increasingly a matter of fine judgement. And so he wants to implement
something in his own way in his own timeframe instead, living with the
howls of protest and the resultant stress.
Does it really help, then, to propose an automated system which counts
and stores these individual sins, which measures his performance against
a public list, which consolidates technical opposition, and which
streamlines patch delivery to guarantee that he is saturated with
potential input at all times?
The solution is surely more humanity, not less.
This could mean a number of things in concrete, of course, including the
naive hope that people might just be more understanding.
Perhaps of more likely benefit though: RedHat might use some of their
new-found capital and offer to fund Linus a dedicated
secretary/adminstrator/PA. Someone who could sort through incoming
patches, check that they diff cleanly, bounce them if they're badly
documented or too large, keep a track of what's being tried in vger or
anywhere else where credible hackers gather, inform patch authors of
what's happened to their progeny, and also delete any incoming emails
that are plain rude before Linus need see them.
It seems to work for Don Knuth, so far as I can tell, and might reduce
the pressure all round.
Just the traditional 2c,
Anthony
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Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>: > It's not about a powertrip. It's about the fact that Linux is getting > larger, and that forces me to require more of people sending me patches. > Long gone are the times when you could just send me a patch and I could > apply it without thinking about it. I think most people recognize this, understand the increasing pressure, and sympathize with your position. On the other hand, all these stories about repeated patch resubmissions being necessary sound all too plausible in the absence of any official, publicly visible patch queue with your annotations on it. I think it would help matters all around if there were a web page somewhere listing pending patches and even as little as a one-line comment from you as to where they are in the integration process. It might even help you organize your own work better. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a> The following is a Python RSA implementation. According to the US Government posting these four lines makes me an international arms trafficker! Join me in civil disobedience; add these lines of code to your .sig block to help get this stupid and unconstitutional law changed. ============================================================================ from sys import*;from string import*;a=argv;[s,p,q]=filter(lambda x:x[:1]!= '-',a);d='-d'in a;e,n=atol(p,16),atol(q,16);l=(len(q)+1)/2;o,inb=l-d,l-1+d while s:s=stdin.read(inb);s and map(stdout.write,map(lambda i,b=pow(reduce( lambda x,y:(x<<8L)+y,map(ord,s)),e,n):chr(b>>8*i&255),range(o-1,-1,-1))) The kind of charity you can force out of people nourishes about as much as the kind of love you can buy --- and spreads even nastier diseases. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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