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There seems to be a line of thinking that one can only be "fake polite" or "aggressive", and that there is no in-between. It is perfectly possible to be assert

There seems to be a line of thinking that one can only be "fake polite" or "aggressive", and that there is no in-between. It is perfectly possible to be assertive without being aggressive - to be certain, and strong-sounding without belittling the person you're talking to. It does require more effort, to many people, than simply screaming at them. But if you want to get the best results out of them, and avoid putting off people who simply don't want to be around someone who screams, then it's worth investing the time.

zwieback 13y ago
Exactly. In addition, I think there's an unfortunate tendency among programmers to wear the "crusty curmudgeon with borderline autism" as a kind of pride, even emulating it to be more credible.
agentultra 13y ago
I agree. There are genuinely intelligent people out there who look up to Linus and people like him. And the problem is that they look up to these people and identify with their behaviour because they want to be seen as uncompromising geniuses. They identify with a contrarian attitude and view conventional social idioms (for a lack of a better word at the moment) as ineffective in technical discussions. And so telling these people that the way they are behaving is not appropriate is essentially viewed by them as a personal insult. It all ends in a very divisive, two-sided argument. The problem with Linus isn't Linus; it's that people want to be like Linus. They want to be seen as strong, assertive, and uncompromising technical leaders. They don't want peoples' feelings to interfere with their work. They view themselves as contrarians and will seek to identify with leaders in their community which reinforce their world-view. And the problem with that is one of misplaced attribution. It's not wrong to use wit and a little strong language in a debate. Christopher Hitchens, a famous contrarian, employed such tactics from time to time with great effect. The difference however between someone like Hitchens and someone moderating a contributions to an open source project is that Hitchens was trained in rhetoric, elocution, and debate. He knew how to use insults and jabs in appropriate situations with practiced intent. Someone who views themselves as a contrarian and identifies with someone like Hitchens or Linus is prone to believe they understand these things when in fact they do not. Very few schools teach such subjects today and I suspect even fewer programmers have ever bothered to take them. However articles like OP's don't serve to forward the discussion. If we attempt to tell people who consider themselves to be intelligent contrarians that they are behaving inappropriately then they will immediately appeal to their heroes' success. This only starts the discussion off as a personal attack and devolves it into a polarized argument. Hardly useful. Instead there must be a way to convince ourselves that losing your temper on a mailing list and denigrating the efforts and skills of other contributors is not the proper way to behave. There are other, more effective ways of being assertive and uncompromising that won't insult people and cause so many needless flame wars.
- theorique 13y ago
  The problem with Linus isn't Linus; it's that people want to be like Linus. This nails it. It's not that Linus or his style are right or wrong, it's that that some people assume that his abrasiveness is the cause of his genius rather than an unrelated personal trait.
lambdaphage 13y ago
I don't understand why it even requires more effort. Here's one of the emails Sharp cites: <mchehab@redhat.com> wrote: > > Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the > returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio. Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand? To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid. > So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, > but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious > bugs and/or regressions. Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously. I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. And you've shown yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit. It adds an insane error code (ENOENT), and then because it's so insane, it adds a few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret"). The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just shameful. It's not how we work. Fix your f*cking "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken. And fix your approach to kernel programming. Linus 329 words. Here is the same email with the dramatic noise removed, and patched up for clarity when necessary: <mchehab@redhat.com> wrote: > > Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the > returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio. It's a bug alright - in the kernel. If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is [broken] even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid. > So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, > but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious > bugs and/or regressions. [This is wrong.] I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. [Your patch doesn't work] so I'll apply it directly and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! The whole patch is broken. It adds an incorrect error code (ENOENT), and then because it's wrong, it adds a few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret"). Breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is wrong. It's not how we work. Fix your "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken. Linus 209 words: a savings of more than 33%.

zwieback 13y ago

Exactly. In addition, I think there's an unfortunate tendency among programmers to wear the "crusty curmudgeon with borderline autism" as a kind of pride, even emulating it to be more credible.

agentultra 13y ago

I agree. There are genuinely intelligent people out there who look up to Linus and people like him. And the problem is that they look up to these people and identify with their behaviour because they want to be seen as uncompromising geniuses. They identify with a contrarian attitude and view conventional social idioms (for a lack of a better word at the moment) as ineffective in technical discussions. And so telling these people that the way they are behaving is not appropriate is essentially viewed by them as a personal insult. It all ends in a very divisive, two-sided argument. The problem with Linus isn't Linus; it's that people want to be like Linus. They want to be seen as strong, assertive, and uncompromising technical leaders. They don't want peoples' feelings to interfere with their work. They view themselves as contrarians and will seek to identify with leaders in their community which reinforce their world-view. And the problem with that is one of misplaced attribution. It's not wrong to use wit and a little strong language in a debate. Christopher Hitchens, a famous contrarian, employed such tactics from time to time with great effect. The difference however between someone like Hitchens and someone moderating a contributions to an open source project is that Hitchens was trained in rhetoric, elocution, and debate. He knew how to use insults and jabs in appropriate situations with practiced intent. Someone who views themselves as a contrarian and identifies with someone like Hitchens or Linus is prone to believe they understand these things when in fact they do not. Very few schools teach such subjects today and I suspect even fewer programmers have ever bothered to take them. However articles like OP's don't serve to forward the discussion. If we attempt to tell people who consider themselves to be intelligent contrarians that they are behaving inappropriately then they will immediately appeal to their heroes' success. This only starts the discussion off as a personal attack and devolves it into a polarized argument. Hardly useful. Instead there must be a way to convince ourselves that losing your temper on a mailing list and denigrating the efforts and skills of other contributors is not the proper way to behave. There are other, more effective ways of being assertive and uncompromising that won't insult people and cause so many needless flame wars.

theorique 13y ago
The problem with Linus isn't Linus; it's that people want to be like Linus. This nails it. It's not that Linus or his style are right or wrong, it's that that some people assume that his abrasiveness is the cause of his genius rather than an unrelated personal trait.

lambdaphage 13y ago

I don't understand why it even requires more effort. Here's one of the emails Sharp cites: <mchehab@redhat.com> wrote: > > Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the > returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio. Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand? To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid. > So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, > but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious > bugs and/or regressions. Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously. I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. And you've shown yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit. It adds an insane error code (ENOENT), and then because it's so insane, it adds a few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret"). The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just shameful. It's not how we work. Fix your f*cking "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken. And fix your approach to kernel programming. Linus 329 words. Here is the same email with the dramatic noise removed, and patched up for clarity when necessary: <mchehab@redhat.com> wrote: > > Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the > returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio. It's a bug alright - in the kernel. If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is [broken] even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid. > So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, > but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious > bugs and/or regressions. [This is wrong.] I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. [Your patch doesn't work] so I'll apply it directly and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! The whole patch is broken. It adds an incorrect error code (ENOENT), and then because it's wrong, it adds a few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret"). Breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is wrong. It's not how we work. Fix your "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken. Linus 209 words: a savings of more than 33%.