Have you looked at the commit that changed the line? There's probably some reasoning in the message, or some discussion the the mailing list for the patch that

Have you looked at the commit that changed the line? There's probably some reasoning in the message, or some discussion the the mailing list for the patch that changed it. You can use https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux for versions pre-git.