Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the maintainer of the development kernel, is cracking down on developers that add last-minute changes to the kernel.
The kernel development team recently set a policy that new features must be added to the next version of the kernel during the two weeks after the release of the previous version.
But James Bottomley, who currently maintains the code for SCSI support in the kernel, said on Wednesday that he is finding it difficult to keep to the two week merge window as contributors are leaving it to him to test whether their patches work with the rest of the system.
"That's a nice theory, except that it's my contributors who drop me in it by leaving their patch sets until you declare a kernel, dumping the integration testing on me in whatever time window is left," said Bottomley, in a posting to the kernel mailing list.
Torvalds replied that Bottomley needs to get tough on his contributors.
"If your submaintainers keep screwing _you_, then you tell them to stop it, and stop accepting their patches in that window, so that it's _their_ code that gets delayed, not yours," he said in an email.Torvalds added that he plans to get tough on people that add things to the kernel too late.
"People always complain that I'm being too soft. Not so this time," said Torvalds.
"If people miss the merge window or start abusing it with hurried last-minute things that just cause problems for -rc1 [the first release candidate], I'll just refuse to merge, and laugh in their faces derisively when they whine plaintively at me, and tell them there's going to be a new opening soon enough," he said.
The latest release of the Linux kernel, version 2.6.14, was released almost a month late due to last-minute mistaken bug reports.
Talkback
I believe the summary given to the article, with Linus laughing at the face of developers, is way out of context and it will be misleading to the readers.
Perhaps the intention of the author was to provoke a response, similar to what I do now.
Making a point in such a way as Linus did is common in developer mailing lists. The recipients do not take it literally because they have been in the list for some time and they understand this sense of humour/way of making a point.
Taking this extracts from a developer mailing list and not providing some helpful background is at least confusing to your readers.
>>Perhaps the intention of the author was to provoke a response, similar to what I do now.
Agreed, but ZDNet knows Linux zealot/hater flamewars are some of the greatest ad revenue generators on the internet, and they milk that for all they can. Myself, I tend to avoid articles like this from this site (and it's sister sites), not only because it's so blatently obvious, but the articles don't generally carry much meat of the topic, either. (More news blurbs than "articles", which is alright if you need quick information, not so good if you are interested in the real story.)
The exception is ZDNet Australia, which I read on a fairly regular basis, though occasionally one slips in there as well. I can only suppose Aussies aren't quite as interested in cheesy rumor mills, and that branch has to actually put some effort into their work.
However, as with yourself, I got suckered in, mostly because I had to see if things possibly changed any since the last inflammatory article. Oh well, cheers to all the other suckers like me!
This is one of the problems with open source. Microsoft developers probably have conversations like this all the time, but they are generally kept private (though occassionally leaked by disgruntled employees!).
I wonder whether as open source gets more commercial, more and more conversations will be held off public mailing lists. I expect a lot of this already happens as open source companies will not want to damage their reputation by making unprofessional comments publicly.