Re: [ATTEND] How to act on LKML (was: [ 00/19] 3.10.1-stable review)

Sarah Sharp
2013-07-16T22:39:57Z

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 12:18:21AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 02:12:35PM -0700, Sarah Sharp wrote:
> > I *hate* both direct personal insults and indirect personal insults.
> > Neither should be acceptable in our community.
> >
> > As I stated in an email to Rusty, what I'm objecting to here is not
> > kernel developers criticizing code. I'm objecting to personal attacks,
> > and developers directing personal verbal abuse towards each other. This
> > include all developers, not just Linus.
>
> Well, there are people like me who don't mind getting personally
> insulted but who are really pained when their work is criticized.
>
> You'd rather tell me I'm a fucking moron than all what I carefully
> designed, wrote and tested is pure crap. Probably that part of the
> reason is that I'm as I am and I'm not really responsible for this,
> so I don't care. Call me ugly if you want, why should I bother ? But
> if you tell me I did some crap, it's entirely my fault and that hurts
> a lot more.

I think we come from different perspectives here. I can change my code.
Therefore, I don't mind my code being insulted. I cannot change myself.
Therefore, I don't want to read verbal abuse directed at me personally.

Things get blurred when we're talking about something a person did.
I can change how I act as a maintainer. Therefore, tell me politely
what I did wrong, and I will change it.

> So you want criticism to change focus for good, but it will not
> necessarily achieve the result you're expecting. Maybe we can lose
> more talented people by telling them their work is pure crap because
> we did not understand it than telling them they're stupid and let
> them argument their choices. At least I don't claim to know which
> one is better, all I can say is that what we have right now works
> well enough in my opinion.

We can tell them their code is bad without calling it crap. Cussing
them out is just a lazy shortcut.

Sarah Sharp