Reasonable people can disagree on things like formatting, features, or the superiority of one interface/product over another... all fair game. And Linus’ contributions give him an enormous amount of credibility and leeway to have it his way. But when you treat people with such disrespect (ex. By calling them a moron), you lose all credibility and respect in my book. There should be no excuse for treating people with disrespect no matter who you are or what your contributions have been. I’m not surprised given his reputation, but I’m still incredibly disappointed
Hard line wraps are moronic, just like spaces for tabs.
It’s an abuse of the newline character, which is meant to represent a new line, not word wrapping. It also destroys the information of where actual newlines are placed. There’s no way to automatically strip out the newlines meant for word wrapping, while leaving newlines meant for new lines.
To use your words Linus: You’re a moron!
Needs a (2012)? But why surface this 9-year-old drama? The whole thread is a nothingburger
I don’t think Linus is being unreasonable here. He has specific standards he expects.
It’s true that his language could be more polite, but what he expects is not a secret.
Curious - why do people get offended by Torvalds? If you know anything about the guy, his rants are a caricature. It's like going for a Tarantino movie and expecting no violence. You're going to get violence. And, it's going to be excessive, over-the-top, ridiculously offensive that there is no other explanation than to treat it as comedy. Any other attempt to explain Linus is flapping wings in a vaccuum. If I was on the receiving end of it, I would play along.
I'm a bit amused that Torvalds is complaining about people submitting non-line-wrapped commit messages even though they look awful when displayed by git because they use a different tool to author them, while submitting line-wrapped comments even though they look awful on the github web interface with proportional fonts because he submits them by email. But of course, it's his repo and he gets to apply whatever style suits him best.
Who is Joseph ?
> [Github's] diffstat is also deficient and useless.
How so? How are the ones of Linux pull requests better?
I recall the "Linux is obsolete" thread. After a long time I read something like that.
Is this still true of GitHub's pull requests? Does Linus still not use them?
The worst thing about Linus is that he's usually right.
To whoever [flagged] this submission: which HN rule does it violate?
This is a prime example of the white supremacy that runs rampant in the American technology culture. A white man is allowed to emotionally abuse people because of his privilege's. This type of behavior perpetuates a toxic white masculine culture that makes it impossible to create safe spaces for BIPOC in technology.
This was an interesting comment thread, and honestly you have to hand it to Linus for continuing to respond and expand on his viewpoints in a pretty level-headed way.
Also, I was reading through it on a phone, which brought to light an interesting point regarding the hard line-wrapping discussion that occurs further on down the thread: when you hard-wrap your lines, you're also defining a minimum line width, under which lines break in awful jagged ways.
I can understand the rationale for hard-wrapping in commit messages, but it drives me up a wall when people use it in things like email or Markdown documents.