Bonum Certa Men Certa

Smear Alert: Linus Torvalds Asking for Better Commit Messages Makes Linus a (Grammar) Nazi

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 09, 2024

Linux creator complains about developers who write commits incorrectly on GitHub

I HAD TO THINK more than twice or thrice before writing this (giving visibility to FUD), but having seen the subject brought up twice and then thrice in "the media" I'd decided to just make a short statement and, instead of linking to the FUD in question, I've decided to just links to this page which contains the links at the bottom; there's also FUD from Aqua Security with quick rebuttals here and some company wants us to think that connecting a printer to a server would become a "Linux" and "DDOS" problem because of unpatched Apple software.

What do we need to know, in a nutshell? When Linus Torvalds released the latest RC of Linux he said: "I try to make my merge commit messages be somewhat "cohesive", and so I often edit the pull request language to match a more standard layout and language. It's not a big deal, and often it's literally just about whitespace so that we don't have fifteen different indentation models and bullet syntaxes. I generally do it as I read through the text anyway, so it's not like it makes extra work for me."

This is how politely he put it:

But what *does* make extra work is when some maintainers use passive
voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation (or,
admittedly, sometimes I just decide I don't care quite enough about
trying to make the messages sound the same).

So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative.
Put another way: I'd love it if people would avoid writing their descriptions as "In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference".
Instead write it as "This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in .." or particularly if you just list bullet points, make the bullet point just be "Fix NULL pointer dereference in ..".
This is not a big deal, I realize. But I happened to try to rewrite a few of these cases the last week, and I think simple and to-the-point language is better. The imperative version of just "Fix X" is about as clear as it gets.

Some rude losers in the media decided to make it seem like Torvalds is some nasty or grumpy "old man" for saying the above. There's nothing unreasonable about his request.

Maybe the "mainstream media" is looking for clickbait or maybe it's actively looking to make a scandal - a phony controversy with which to make the job of coordinating Linux unpleasant.

Notice they don't say anything about technical aspects of Linux. Maybe they cannot grasp it, so they look for "gossip" instead.

Remember the famous quote about how "great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people" (like Torvalds).

It's also clear that some "journalists" cannot tell the difference between Git and GitHub (Linux is not developed in GitHub), so they are clearly out of their ballpark.

Later the so-called journalists wonder why people won't take them seriously and, as Andy put it in his new article, society strays further and further away from facts.

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