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Linus's mid-merge-window reflections

From:  Linus Torvalds <torvalds-AT-linux-foundation.org>
To:  Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel-AT-vger.kernel.org>
Subject:  Short update and pause in 2.6.27 merge window
Date:  Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:47:45 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:  <alpine.LFD.1.10.0807170919370.2959@woody.linux-foundation.org>


This is just a quick note to let people know that I'll be off for an 
extended weekend starting later today, so the next few days will be very 
quiet from a merge standpoint.

Feel free to send the merge requests, just don't get worried when I don't 
act on them ;)

(There's also a few merge requests that I didn't act on yet just because I 
wanted to take a closer look - but if you're worried about it there is 
nothing wrong with re-sending it. I _do_ just drop requests in the 
bottomless pit that is my mailbox at times)

We seem to be roughly half-way through the merge window, judging purely by 
number of commits, although part of my calculations there is that I'm 
actually hoping/expecting that because a number of people are on vacation 
etc, this merge window might be smaller than some of the other recent ones 
(2.6.25-rc1 in particular was huge).

In the last couple of days I _have_ merged 50+ trees, and while there's 
been some 'heated discussion' about some of them (you know who you are ;), 
I'm hoping that we're actually in reasonably good shape even though it's 
in the middle of the merge window, and that people will test out the 
snapshot kernels even though I'm not ready to do a -rc1 release.

So go out and test.

The fact that much of it has been in linux-next may or may not have 
helped, but it definitely meant that people knew of _some_ problems early. 
Let's see how people feel about that after the whole release is done, but 
it certainly doesn't seem to have hurt.

My personal favorite merge is the BKL pushdown, which while not likely to 
matter hugely in practice for lots of people is nice to finally see. We 
kind of dropped the ball on the BKL once it got to be small enough that it 
wasn't very high on peoples radar any more. Now the most noticeable user 
of the BKL in "core" kernel code seems to be fs/locks.c.

Hint, hint. I think somebody had some patches for that one too. Matthew?

But we've had lots of other things (in fact, the BKL changes ended up 
being much smaller than I expected), and the dirstat so far is

	   4.7% arch/arm/
	   3.3% arch/mips/
	   3.5% arch/ppc/platforms/
	  14.9% arch/ppc/
	   3.3% arch/x86/
	  29.3% arch/
	   8.3% drivers/char/drm/
	   9.3% drivers/char/
	   7.3% drivers/gpu/drm/
	   7.3% drivers/gpu/
	   3.3% drivers/s390/
	  10.4% drivers/usb/misc/
	   6.0% drivers/usb/serial/
	  17.2% drivers/usb/
	  45.0% drivers/
	   7.1% firmware/
	   4.3% fs/ubifs/
	   5.0% fs/
	   6.7% include/
	   3.3% sound/

where some of those percentages are a bit misleading (the "gpu" part, for 
example, goes away if you enable renames, since that was all really just 
moving files around from drivers/char/ - but at the same time it's one of 
the things people may notice more, so I chose the non-rename version of 
dirstat on purpose).

No network or driver core/USB merges yet (the USB stuff in the dirstat is 
from the ARM, BKL and firmware merges) so there are complete big 
subsystems lacking still, but it would be good to have people test the 
things we _have_ merged.

			Linus

PS. And to get wider distribution for this message: Digg users - you're 
all a bunch of Wanking Walruses. And you can quote me on that.
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Linus's mid-merge-window reflections

Posted Jul 17, 2008 19:56 UTC (Thu) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

Calling diggers "Wanking Walruses" ,though not nice, will give them attention and that is what
they really want ;) 

Maybe Linus is a digg user too, with all the implications that obviously come along with it ..
hmm .. that would give him some common ground with the OpenBSD people. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybK_qbo9h70  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciLllSAcF-8 

Linus flamebait

Posted Jul 18, 2008 11:05 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

After watching Linus's talk on git, and reading his recent thoughts on such subjects as
OpenBSD and C++, I've come to the conclusion that he purposefully comes out with these juicy
statements because people expect it.  God bless him, but Linus is becoming something of a
pantomime dame.

Linus making statements for effect

Posted Jul 18, 2008 11:30 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

This is not a change. He was like this on Usenet in 1993... besides, you 
*know* that the right way to find the answer to something on the net isn't 
to simply ask (nobody will answer), but to confidently state something 
slightly wrong, whereupon heaps of people will pop up to correct you and 
prove themselves right.

(It makes other people feel better *and* you learn what you wanted to 
learn. You just have to be willing to look like a fool in front of 
thousands of people.)

Linus making statements for effect

Posted Jul 25, 2008 16:33 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

you *know* that the right way to find the answer to something on the net isn't to simply ask (nobody will answer), but to confidently state something slightly wrong, whereupon heaps of people will pop up to correct you and prove themselves right.

That's a great observation, and it reminds me of another public discussion technique, pushing rather than pulling information:

Years ago, I participated in a mailing list where I knew the topic pretty well, but with significant holes. If I wasn't confident in an answer to a question, I hung back a few days to see if a real expert would step forward, but it never happened. Instead, I discovered quickly that when I finally gave my half-baked answer, a particular person - Ted - would immediately post with the correct answer. Well, I didn't get embarassed and stop answering questions; I started answering them all immediately, even irresponsibly. Where I was wrong, Ted would immediately post the correction and the questioner got good information quickly.

Incidentally, it was never my impression that Ted was trying to slap down people showing their stupidity. I believed that he was just letting others share some of the burden and glory of answering questions. After all, I wasn't always wrong.

Linus's mid-merge-window reflections

Posted Jul 17, 2008 20:53 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Please, please, please let some future release of Ubuntu be called "Wanking Walrus".

Linus's mid-merge-window reflections

Posted Jul 17, 2008 23:14 UTC (Thu) by alspnost (guest, #2763) [Link]

I'll vote for that - but not before we've had "Shagadelic Shark"...

Ubuntu naming

Posted Aug 2, 2008 17:07 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

If the current naming trend continues, you may propose that to the SABDFL in seven years.
However, I assume that he's learned something from the early days' artwork fiasco, so don't
hold your breath.

Linus's mid-merge-window reflections

Posted Jul 18, 2008 9:02 UTC (Fri) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link]

Ah, the freedoms of not working for a big corporation ;)

Linus's mid-merge-window reflections

Posted Jul 18, 2008 9:27 UTC (Fri) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link]

My personal favorite merge is the BKL pushdown [...]
Congrats to our editor :)


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