It's worth reading one of the other comments in that thread, by the person who Linus is replying to: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/14/192 https://lkml.org/lkml/

It's worth reading one of the other comments in that thread, by the person who Linus is replying to: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/14/192 https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/14/192 And/or a clarification someone else gave to Linus: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/15/38 https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/15/38 The code in question is for parsing command-line arguments, and its goal is to determine if the user was specifying an (optional) kernel version. When the goal is to guess what a user is intending, you're inherently dependent on _name_ of the version, not its features. And, contrary to what Linus says, you care just as much about future versions as old ones. So Linus's criticism is almost entirely wrong, for the actual use-case of the author of this request. There are other alternate criticisms, perhaps, and of course Linus's criticism does apply to most people who write "check this version" code.