Quote of the week

[Posted October 15, 2025 by corbet]

There are already _so_ many roadblocks for contributing upstream. This just adds another one. On the one hand, it's just another "small" one. I don't believe it's as small as some people would like to believe, "b4 dig" will do nothing for "life before upstream" type usages.
Ultimately, this is yet another question of how much you want to make life harder for contributors of all sorts. A link gives bug reporters who somehow find a commit (e.g. bisect) more context to go on, gives people working on things like hardware enabling that happens pre- upstream (in a way) a lot of context, makes things faster in general, etc.
And we're taking it away because literally *one* person thinks that it adds irrelevant noise.

— Johannes Berg on Link: tags

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"literally one person"

Posted Oct 16, 2025 13:46 UTC (Thu) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (2 responses)

And that "literally *one* person" is the boss of the project. boo hoo.

Some projects ARE democracies. This one isn't.
It's been working for 30 some years.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

"literally one person"

Posted Oct 16, 2025 17:05 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

That one person would appear to be backing down a bit as a result of this discussion.

"literally one person"

Posted Oct 16, 2025 17:50 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

> And that "literally *one* person" is the boss of the project. boo hoo.
> Some projects ARE democracies. This one isn't.
> It's been working for 30 some years.
> If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I believe your view of the situation is excessively simplistic, even arrogantly so. You might want to rethink it.

The entire reason of why it's "been working for 30 some years" is that Linus generally tends to listen to insights from other people (or, in other words, tries to avoid pissing off the majority of the important contributors). This is the "B" in "BDFL", and this is the only reason people have *let* him be the boss of the project. It's not a law of nature.