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

Darren Hart
2013-07-16T04:12:00Z

On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 23:37 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 23:34 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 13:14 +1000, NeilBrown wrote:
> >
> > > Surely there is an enormous difference between being required to defend your
> > > position against rational and forceful argument, and being required to defend
> > > it against irrelevant name calling.
> >
> > Sure, but I don't think there's really much name calling in the kernel
> > community.
> >
> > I just scanned a large number of LKML emails, and they all seemed rather
> > technical, and no personal attacks at all. And that included several
> > emails from Linus as well. Probably the strongest email came from Thomas
> > Gleixner, but even that didn't contain any personal name calling. Mostly
> > he called stuff "crap" but that was about the code and claims that the
> > code did, but not about the person.
> >
> > There are a few times that Linus gets a bit colorful with his
> > criticisms, but that's really the minority of the email and not the
> > overall tone. I think Linus picks his battles. Sometimes he goes
> > overboard, but he's human. But I still think he's running this ship
> > well.
> >
>
> I just found this gem: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/10/600
>
> But it's just Linus ranting about having "make install" modify the
> source tree (which I totally agree with him, as I've stumbled over crap
> like this in other projects). But he's bitching about the code, not the
> person who asked him to pull it.

Excellent example Steve. This is the core of what I was trying to get
at. Linus vehemently and colorfully expressed his distate for *problem*
and told the developer what they needed to do differently. No personal
attack there.

Would I like to be on the receiving end of that email... No, I would
not. However, I can also understand being fed up with lots of little
things like this and not having the patience or the desire to treat each
one as a mentoring opportunity. The difference tends to be I rant to my
close friends and Linus does so in public.... he's the more honest of
the two of us I think :-)

--
Darren Hart
Intel Open Source Technology Center
Yocto Project - Technical Lead - Linux Kernel