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Comment by tytso | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people are upset with Linus's writing style. I considered what he wrote to be quite polite. He was merely stating his standards in terms of what he would and wouldn't accept (and github pull requests are on the "won't accept" list). He even explained why he wouldn't accept it.

Furthermore, the patch was deficient in other ways. (a) it was missing the Signed-off-by: header, and (b) it should have been sent to the linux-bluetooth mailing list or one of the Bluetooth maintainers, with the linux-bluetooth mailing list cc'ed.

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I think Torvalds position in this issue was correct. But I disagree with the description of him being polite. In one of his comments his quote was like, "You are a moron." That's not polite. Granted, he has a well-established style when he goes into rant mode on a certain issue. And Linux is his baby more than anybody else's. And he almost always takes the right side of any issue. So we should all cut him some slack. But he was not polite.

Again, it's Linux. And the issue was over what/whether/how he should accept commits into torvalds/linux on GitHub. Anybody's free to commit anywhere and fork Linux or make custom builds, distros, etc. But if there's one place he has the absolute right to be a tyrant is over torvalds/linux. The fact that he also designed and bootstrapped git for the whole purpose of doing version control The Right Way, based on his needs for Linux development, is just icing on the cake of that argument. But he was not polite.

https://github.com/pirtlj

pirtlj "I did not realizes that Linus' shit does not stink." torvalds "you are a moron"

Seems fair to me.

I think it was comments like "The fact that I have higher standards then makes people like you make snarky comments, thinking that you are cool.

You're a moron." that people thought impolite. The comment he responded to appears to have been deleted, however, so I can make no judgement about how appropriate that was. I'd like to think it was completely appropriate -- I do agree with you overall that his other comments were reasonably polite.

I don't remember the exact wording of the comment that was deleted, but I did see it and I remember it making me feel very angry, despite that I wasn't even involved in the discussion. My personal belief is that Linus' response was quite classy in comparison, especially given that others in the conversation weren't stepping up to take issue with the comment.

He was responding to someone who told him his "shit don't stink". Sort of understandable!

I note that GitHub actually did a blog entry sometime ago about good commit practice, and it seems to be the same as what Torvald's requires. Not sure I'm understanding what th issue is... https://github.com/blog/926-shiny-new-commit-styles

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