Weekly Edition
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Quotes of the week
I think I preferred it when people just stared blankly when I told
them what I do.
-- Val Henson
When you reject useful patches based on "this is not our preferred
style", you piss people off. That is a significant reason why
people choose to spend their time elsewhere. In certain cases
having people abandon the kernel may be a net gain, in many it is a
loss.
-- Jörn Engel
[M]y experience with checkpatch.pl is the exact opposite of what you
fear: it _widened_ the contributor base: a good number of newbies
felt encouraged that an objective piece of tool reports an "error"
in a file that was written by otherwise "much more knowledgable"
kernel hackers. checkpatch.pl is basically the "yes, really, you
are right, this piece of code in the Linux kernel is indeed crap"
review tool that reinforces newbies. It lowers the bar of entry to
kernel hacking, and it does so for exactly those pieces of code
that we want newbies to be active on: barely maintained source
code.
-- Ingo Molnar(Log in to post comments)
Val's experience is disturbing Posted Mar 27, 2008 1:11 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] I think I preferred it when people just stared blankly when I told them what I do. Reading the rest of his blog entry, I'm somewhat concerned over what impact the Reiser murder trial will have on the general public's perception of Linux. We Linux users/hackers persevered through a huge lawsuit (SCO) and lots of Microsoft FUD tactics over the past several years, but presenting an image to the average joe that Linux users and developers aren't a bunch of psychopathic nerds or murderers seems to be the next challenge. I somewhat blame the media covering the Reiser trial for this - it seems most articles I read about the trial start out by saying, "Linux programmer Hans Reiser..."
Val's experience is disturbing Posted Mar 27, 2008 1:27 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] "her" blog entry...
Ouch Posted Mar 27, 2008 1:41 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Ooh, I screwed that one up. Thanks for the correction, and my sincerest apologies to Val!
Val's experience is disturbing Posted Mar 27, 2008 11:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] It's time to link to Val's real home page again, isn't it ;}}}(that was the most impressive, and funniest, test of the disturbing way in which people's ideas are valued less merely because they happen to be female that I've ever seen.)
I'm confused... Posted Mar 27, 2008 13:12 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Okay, now I'm confused. I really don't want to offend Val or otherwise say anything offensive or inappropriate. I kind of remember a discussion on LWN a year or two ago, about Val and Val's gender identity, which got out of hand. Lots of hurtful and insensitive comments flying around. But, PLEASE let's not revisit that ordeal. That being said, I don't care about Val's gender identity or sex - Val certainly contributes to the Linux community with Val's blog, and Val's latest entry seems to indicate that the public has an unclear or distorted perception of Linux (and its community). Granted, Hans Reiser's recent histrionics on the stand (causing the judge to chuckle, etc.) likely makes him relatively more newsworthy in the San Francisco Bay area - in other words, people are perhaps more likely to recognize Reiser's name (or have the associated thought/idea of Linux pop into their memories) during casual conversation (as Val's property manager's reaction would seem to indicate).
I'm confused... Posted Mar 28, 2008 3:23 UTC (Fri) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] I had a brain blip and referred to her as "Valerie Whatsername" during a session at LCA this year, only to discover that she was sitting two seats away... now that's embarrassing. The funny thing is that you'd think I couldn't possibly forget her surname, because I'm a huge fan of the late Jim Henson (no relation)!
Val's experience is disturbing Posted Mar 27, 2008 21:13 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Sorry, who is it that is thought to be valuing ideas differently based on whether somebody's female?
Gender values Posted Mar 27, 2008 23:35 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Watch the movie Tootsie (starring Dustin Hoffman) sometime. That may be an unfair comparison; paid soap opera acting is a wildly different career than volunteer (or paid) operating system kernel developer. Whereas Dustin Hoffman's character dressed in drag in order to get an acting job, Val's motivation may have been to shatter any myths (perceived or not) that women are any less capable at kernel hacking than men.
Gender values Posted Mar 28, 2008 21:29 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] IIRC (fading memory of stuff over a year old) that was exactly her point.
Val's experience is disturbing Posted Mar 27, 2008 3:11 UTC (Thu) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link] I'm not sure it's very widespread outside of Wired. A quick google news search of "linux reiser" reveals that it is mostly Wired stories listing him as "Linux guru Hans Reiser".
Yeah, I just noticed that also Posted Mar 27, 2008 3:24 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Agreed... Now that I think of it, the preponderance of online articles I read about the Reiser trial are coming from Wired.com. Perhaps I'm getting an unbalanced account of it all...
Val's experience is disturbing Posted Mar 28, 2008 10:38 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] Eh. I think the public believes that murderers are random and unpredictable, coming out of all sorts of social groups. The court cases of OJ Simpson and the publicity around Chris Benoit didn't really hurt football or wrestling.
It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style Posted Mar 27, 2008 1:39 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] When you reject useful patches based on "this is not our preferred style", you piss people off. Ahhh, it just wouldn't be a LWN Weekly Edition without more debate over coding style. (Yes, I do realize that this particular one is merely tangential to LWN.) People often fail to realize that sloppy and/or ill-formatted code has both direct and indirect impact on the reliability and maintainability of a software project. These two attributes of software are incredibly paramount in Linux. I shudder to think of how much time and effort is spent on troubleshooting a kernel panic where the developer has to wade through hundreds of lines of source trying to find matching curly braces, an assignment operator where a == should have been, or (my personal favorite) a stray semicolon at the end of a for( ) or while( ) loop (those are pure evil!). Get with the program folks. No matter where you go, you will be expected to abide by standards. It's just a fact of life. And announcing that you will continue to willfully "violate the style. Just to spite the fundamentalist movement" is not very professional, nor will it make you many friends. Here's an idea: Let's all write code in RPG, where each statement (one character each) must go in a particular column and line number without any tolerance for varying styles.
It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style Posted Mar 27, 2008 6:24 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] > I shudder to think of how much time and effort is spent on troubleshooting a kernel panic where the developer has to wade through hundreds of lines of source trying to find matching curly braces, an assignment operator where a == should have been, or (my personal favorite) a stray semicolon at the end of a for( ) or while( ) loop (those are pure evil!). Yes, I think we can all agree that C is the *very worst* language Linus could have chosen to start coding Linux in - Modula-2 would have been *so* much better. *ducks* Seriously - if a stylistic convention isn't pissing everyone off equally, chances are it's just a reflection of the preferences of the biggest bully in the room. For all of your impassioned ranting that everyone must compromise or suffer in misery and torment, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that one's acceptance into a community will cause some adjustment in its conducts and practices - and nor is it unreasonable to leave that community as soon as one discovers otherwise. If rules exist, they do so as boundaries for discussion and starting points for development, not as decrees fixed for all time. That's just how communities *work*, and programming teams are no different - or at any rate, they *shouldn't* be.
It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style Posted Mar 27, 2008 7:36 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] ... unless there are millions of lines of code already written to one standard. Choose one: (a) new code matches it, (b) the millions of lines of old code are altered to match a new style, or (c) you get a mishmash of different styles. Nobody will do (b), and nobody wants (c). What's left?
It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style Posted Apr 3, 2008 3:40 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] (c) happens anyway, despite everyone's best intentions. That's community too.
It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style Posted Mar 27, 2008 7:48 UTC (Thu) by bangert (subscriber, #28342) [Link] > to willfully "violate the style. Just to spite the fundamentalist > movement" is equally fundamentalist.
It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style Posted Mar 27, 2008 12:15 UTC (Thu) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link] yes - and in arch/x86 (where this discussion originated from) we do not actually reject patches based on style issues - we either fix it ourselves if it's easy, or we ask people to fix them up and if they refuse it we still do it ourselves. So far out of the more than hundred arch/x86 contributors in v2.6.25 (who authored over 1200 arch/x86 changes since v2.6.24) it happened only once that a cleanup request from us x86 maintainers was refused. In that case we simply cleaned up the patches ourselves. There's not a single arch/x86 patch that has been submitted to lkml that is not in x86.git right now which has been rejected for pure style issues. People actually like consistent code, they like if code "looks nice" throughout a subsystem, and they like the increased maintainability and lower bug rate this brings. It just needs maintainers and tools reminding people of that in a neutral, objective, non-intrusive and non-workflow-impacting but still persistent manner. It's easy to get non-functional components of source code wrong, it happens to oldtimers just as much as newbies. This discussion IMHO is more about those maintainers who have a gut reaction against like the bad news that a "scripts/checkpatch.pl --file */*.c" run brings when they run it over their own files. As someone who has fixed literally thousands of style issues i certainly know that "oh no!" feeling! :-)
It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style Posted Mar 27, 2008 12:38 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] Heh. Shadows of the Debian dpkg mess with Ian. The difference here is that you guys are much faster at the "cleanup the foreign mess and merge" important step, AND that there is absolutely no small hole someone could try to pry open in order to get one of the worst git history mess I have ever seen merged directly into mainline. Kudos to the arch/x86 maintainers.
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