Comment by amputect | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amputect | Hacker News Reader

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To add further context, here's Linus' (imo rude and totally unproductive) rant from https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/23/611, which Daniel Vetter is replying to:

The tinydrm code seems like absolute pure shit that has never seen a compiler.

I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect some qualitty control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly seen none at all.

And those patches were apparently committed yesterday.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

I get tons and tons of lines of warnings:

  drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c: In function ‘mipi_dbi_typec1_command’:
  drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c:65:20: warning: field width

specifier ‘’ expects argument of type ‘int’, but argument 5 has type ‘size_t {aka long unsigned int}’ [-Wformat=] DRM_DEBUG_DRIVER("cmd=%02x, par=%ph\n", cmd, len, data); \

with nasty chains of nested defines, but then I also get actual compile failures

  drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:198:26: error:

redefinition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ struct backlight_device tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In file included from drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:11:0: ./include/drm/tinydrm/tinydrm-helpers.h:53:1: note: previous definition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ was here tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(with similar stuff for tinydrm_disable_backlight()).
It looks like it might compile if CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE was enabled rather than being a module.
Doing this:
-#ifdef CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE +#if IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE)
in tinydrm-helpers.h gets rid of the complete build failure, and only leaves the tens of lines of warnings.

How the hell did this get to the point where crap like this is even sent to me? Nobody tested anything*?

AND WHY THE HELL WAS THIS UTTER SHITE SENT TO ME IF IT WAS COMMITTED YESTERDAY?

It would be really, really easy to make the exact same points, simply by typing less. I've seen a lot of people defend Linus on the grounds that he's "terse" but this is actually quite unnecessarily verbose, and would be much clearer and easy to read without the temper tantrums bookending it. Starting from "I get tons of" and ending with the "in tinydrm-helpers.h" line would make the exact same point, without requiring an actual adult to step in and try to do damage control for him to prevent him from driving a promising newbie out of the project.

Agreed. Linus's rants tend to be:

> Derision and general point

> Insult

> Derision and minor point

> Actual, concrete, well reasoned point

> Derision

He usually has very good points, but people tend to focus on the derision and insults. That means people aren't seeing the points he's making. That's not entirely their fault. Communication is a two way street, and he's making his own communication actively worse.

His infamous C++ rant (http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus) is the one I always go back to. It makes perfect sense when you realize he's talking about coding for the kernel or otherwise coding for something that can only really be understood as a series of bytes. It's complete nonsense if you're talking about, say, business software, where all that abstraction makes the software comprehensible. He also does things in that rant like essentially champion reinventing the wheel, though, too.

People always defend him by saying:

* "Passive aggressive corporate culture is toxic!"

* "It works so it's not toxic/who cares if it's toxic!"

* "They don't have to contribute if they don't want to!"

And I just don't buy any of those arguments as a defense for bad behavior.

You claim that "he's making communication worse". Well, you don't know that really. He using strong language could actually make his communication more effective. You can wave your hands and say it's "bad behavior", but that is subjective as well.

And where exactly is there an insult, though?

You seem to confuse he calling CODE shit with he calling PEOPLE shit.

People very well can see the points even though there is strong language. There is a small amount of people that ONLY look at the strong language and make a point out of it.

> And I just don't buy any of those arguments as a defense for bad behavior.

You define bad behavior as using strong language (swear words basically) and then accept nothing as a defense. But no-one really cares about what you buy.

And may I add that he STARTS THE EMAIL with this (the point):

"I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect some qualitty [sic.] control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly seen none at all."

Then he goes to describe the details to prove his point.

He is _upset_. That's a feeling, you know. Then he calls the patch shit. So there is a guy who gets pissed off and calls code shit once in a while. Maybe he has Tourette's, we don't know. Why do you actually care? Why are you so sensitive exactly?

Oh yeah, and I think he has been wrong in my opinion on many topics. I don't think he's god. But LET HIM BE HUMAN!

From what I gather, he is roughly the equivalent of a CEO and most CEOs would not ever see a lot of what gets sent to him because it would get killed way earlier.

Yes? No?

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