It’s half this, and half an explicit policy “we do not break user space”. Together it meant that if you did anything that screwed up the user space you got told about it at length.
Now Linux culture is established enough that it only really needs the policy, and not the cussing people out to enforce it.
I wasn’t aware of that email, only the quote itself.
…not gonna lie, I think that it was beautiful. I have my bones to pick with pulseaudio but come on, you don’t shift blame like this, the guy deserved some smacking.
On-topic: I have my doubts if policy is enough to enforce it, or at least to enforce it in an efficient way.
Well this is it. What really enforces the policy is rejecting commits that break user space.
Now if you’ve got a large enough group of devs, rejecting commits is fine, but if you’ve only got a small group you need everyone to be working productively, and you can see why Linus ended up giving angry feedback about commits that were wasting everyone’s time.
It’s half this, and half an explicit policy “we do not break user space”. Together it meant that if you did anything that screwed up the user space you got told about it at length.
Now Linux culture is established enough that it only really needs the policy, and not the cussing people out to enforce it.
Famous email about it here: https://linuxreviews.org/WE_DO_NOT_BREAK_USERSPACE
I wasn’t aware of that email, only the quote itself.
…not gonna lie, I think that it was beautiful. I have my bones to pick with pulseaudio but come on, you don’t shift blame like this, the guy deserved some smacking.
On-topic: I have my doubts if policy is enough to enforce it, or at least to enforce it in an efficient way.
Well this is it. What really enforces the policy is rejecting commits that break user space.
Now if you’ve got a large enough group of devs, rejecting commits is fine, but if you’ve only got a small group you need everyone to be working productively, and you can see why Linus ended up giving angry feedback about commits that were wasting everyone’s time.