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Comment by sirnicolaz | Hacker News Reader

> This release is a record-breaker on all fronts; it brought in 18,765 non-merge commits from 3,021 developers, 807 of whom were first-time kernel developers.

hopefully without kernel-slops :P good job everyone btw!

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BTW, here we are: LOC metric everyone made fun of has suddenly became commit count metric.

Features? Bugfixes? What? Look how many commits we've got!

1. They weren't counting LOC though, but commits. It's a totally different metric.

2. This type of stat was always being shared with each new release, giving a general indication of the size of changes. They did not started posting it all of a sudden due to AI.

> 1. They weren't counting LOC though, but commits. It's a totally different metric.

Is this satire? :D

I think in Linux world commits usually mean something which isn’t always the case at random company X. A commit being a meaningful change where number of lines doesn’t matter.

A commit can delete or modify lines, it at least isn't as bad as the "more code = better" approach, though perhaps it's still flawed in that you could have lots of very minor commits to increase the count, or do and then undo a change to get 2 free commits.

It felt to me like it's more of a neat fact rather than a measure of quality.

Is Linus still checking every commit?

That‘s what subsystem maintainers are for.

That's a big ask for those maintainers who are volunteers

Most, if not all, are employed by different companies or Kernel.org.

Linux is big business.

It's a big ask to expect people to do the thing they volunteered to do and can step back from doing any time they want?

Do people still think that Linux is being developed by unpaid hackers in a garage?

Only if he finds something odd in the pull request summary.

Linus thinks AI is no different from a compiler, so it's likely that none of these commits are being reviewed. After all, how often do you doubt your compiler's output?

Unless we think he's some kind of software god, it doesn't really matter if he does or doesn't. The real question is how many other people are?

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