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Title: Linus Torvalds Blasts Kernel Dev For 'Making the World Worse' With
'Garbage' Patches

Link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/08/12/215...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: You can't say Linux creator
Linus Torvalds didn't give the kernel developers fair warning. He'd told
them: "The upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for
me. I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday),
and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too,
I'm spending about half the month traveling." Therefore, Torvalds continued,
"That does not mean I'll be more lenient to late pull requests (probably
quite the reverse, since it's just going to add to the potential chaos)." So,
when Meta software engineer Palmer Dabbelt pushed through a set of RISC-V
patches and admitted "this is very late," he knew he was playing with fire.
He just didn't know how badly he'd be burned. Torvalds fired back on the
Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): "This is garbage and it came in too late. I
asked for early pull requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow
that rule, at least make the pull requests good." It went downhill from
there. Torvalds continued: "This adds various garbage that isn't RISC-V
specific to generic header files. And by 'garbage," I really mean it. This is
stuff that nobody should ever send me, never mind late in a merge window."
Specifically, Torvalds hated the "crazy and pointless" way in which one of
the patch's helper functions combined two unsigned 16-bit integers into a 32-
bit integer. How bad was it? "That thing makes the world actively a worse
place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and
actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid 'helper.'" In addition to the
quality issues, Torvalds was annoyed that the offending code was added to
generic header files rather than the RISC-V tree. He emphasized that such
generic changes could negatively impact the broader Linux community, writing:
"You just made things WORSE, and you added that 'helper' to a generic non-
RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make other code
worse too... So no. Things like this need to get bent. It does not go into
generic header files, and it damn well does not happen late in the merge
window. You're on notice: no more late pull requests, and no more garbage
outside the RISC-V tree." [...] Dabbelt gets it. He replied, "OK, sorry. I've
been dropping the ball lately, and it kind of piled up, taking a bunch of
stuff late, but that just leads to me making mistakes. So I'll stop being
late, and hopefully that helps with the quality issues."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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