meanwhile Linus hounding down the google devs for making stupid pull requests
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Do you have some context for this? I'm out of the loop.
Years ago, Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, was notoriously mean to people who submitted bad code.
Like he would straight up call it absolute dogshit and say they should feel ashamed, he'd call them fucking morons, on one occasion I believe he even told someone to kill themselves.
In the years since, though, he's said that he's found the abrasive authority figure schtick doesn't really work and has the unfortunate side effect of making others involved adversarial too, or will hasten the notorious FOSS developer burnout, and he has changed to a much warmer and friendlier way of working, and been quite apologetic about his past attitude.
Oh he's still perfectly blunt about code, and even about people if need be but he makes sure he has a good night's worth of sleep before he does that to not do it in anger. Which means dress-downs are now of the "I'm not angry, I'm disappointed" type. I'm not aware of him ever telling people to kill themselves, just erm "wondering":
Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
(And to be fair, yes, reading things one byte at a time is fucking stupid. Not something you'd ever expect in a kernel)
I'm not referring to that incident, I'm referring to his criticisms when he was using OpenSUSE and became frustrated at having to use the root password to do basically anything:
"If you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that [users] need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place."
And just as with you said above, yes, he is right, but it was completely uncalled for and unprofessional to go about the criticism in such a way.
I do find his quips funny, and in some workplaces it'd just be behind-closed-doors banter, but it's right that he doesn't go on mean rants anymore. Publicly humiliating devs and wiping your hands clean of the situation while your fans continue to harass them is not optimal.
To be fair, he has to deal with a lot of nonsense in his job. A lot of companies try to push utter crap through, and if his subsystem maintainers miss something, it makes his life much more difficult. He's merging tons of changes every day and doesn't have the time to review everything.
So I think some righteous anger is justified here. His subsystem maintainers should know better, and his anger was usually directed at them, not some random new contributor.
Absolutely. His workload was insane and unending, and if crap code made its way through, he'd get a portion of the blame. It's very human to lash out in the way he did, particularly when he frequently saw the same mistakes over and over again.
But it's right that he made steps to not act in that way anymore. Linux developer burnout is bad enough even without Linus and others publicly calling you a shithead or telling you to kill yourself when you fuck up.
Yup. My point was that it's not necessarily autism or bullying that brought us here, but years of dealing with people who should know better. I'm glad he's toned it down though, but I did secretly enjoy reading his creative insults (and wouldn't want to be on the receiving end).
I'll allow it.
The trick is to stop giving af about demands from random assholes. Using software doesn't entitle anyone to updates. Part of the point of open source is if you want it to be different, the source code is available for you to do that.
Yup. I've contributed to a number of FOSS projects (including lemmy) and try to always observe the proper etiquette. That means (IMO):
- read through the contribution guidelines and follow them to a T
- check for feedback at least once/day
- allow at least two days for initial feedback, and gradually back off (so bump after 2 days, bump again after another 3-4 days)
- if there's no feedback after a week, bring it up on another channel (IRC, Matrix, email, etc)
- never demand anything, always ask how to help
None of that is written down anywhere, but to me it's common sense. If you don't want to do that, fork the project and maintain it yourself. Maybe they'll pull your changes in if they're good.
Well, it's fun that they mention F-Droid, because the maintainers are bullies who bully their contributors and generally act very unpleasant. They like to make new rules on the spot.
I abandoned using the project altogether, not someone I want to support.
What rules?
That apps published there can't be wrappers around a web application.
Good rule, those should be web addresses, not apps. Or even better, native applications rather than web apps, but it does depend on the context.
Eh... why? More to the point, it's not mentioned anywhere in their guidelines, it was made up on the spot by the fella doing the code review.
They are inefficient and bloated.
And personally, I prefer good reasoning over good rules. If something comes up that is a bad idea but there's no existing rule against it, the rules should be changed to address it. As long as the reasoning is sound, I think it's a good thing, especially when we're talking about something like a software distribution platform as opposed to say laws that determine freedom or imprisonment.
Also if you've made a web app, let it be installed as a web app. Both FF and Chrome let you install web apps in one click.
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What's a wrapper in this context?
An app that's just WebView?
Not WebView, but a so-called TWA, aka Trusted Web Activity, a features specifically designed to wrap PWAs and give them full-blown app capabilities.
If you really want to have it available on F-Droid, you can always put it in a separate repository. So I can see it being annoying that they reject it from their repo, but there's still a reasonable path forward.
Well, I have the app on Google Play store, which was originally meant to be the alternative, now it's the main store.
Seems to me like they've done a pretty good job keeping their store free of malicious apps, I've never heard of any breaches like I have of every other store including Snap and Flatpak.
Maybe they're pissing some people off in the process, but maybe it's the right people to piss off. They've been able to hold it together in the FOSS app space better than most.
I would simply deal with these bullies by telling them to fuck off and fork their own thing instead of bugging me to push an update on the main. This feels nore like it should be happening to closed source things where the only way to get a thing in it is to beg the dev.
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