Why This Hacker Stood Up Against ‘Verbal Abuse’ in Linux Land
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You need to drop the 'female' part of your comment, and then re-evaluate what you're saying. This has little to do with her being a female, but everything to do with Linus being a jackass. As myself and others on this thread have said, you can be forthright and direct, WITHOUT being abusive. And you'd better believe if he (or ANYONE), acted that way towards me, I'd certainly have a problem with them, and tell them so.
His 'way of management' is not the issue: no one doubts he gets things done.
And back to your comment about her being a female...would YOU appreciate someone talking to your sister/mother/grandmother/aunt that way? Your daughter? If you don't want that for yourself, don't expect others to want it either.
Don't take me wrong here sir, I have immense respect for the females but I really hate to say as I see it this whole drama is getting unnecessary attention for the same reason, being her a female developer. My question still remains the same, where were all you guys before she decided to complain of what she hasn't experienced still?
Now, regarding the Mouro's incident, from where I see it, Linus first explained in that email what's wrong with the code and what to fix and what Mouro chose to ignore deliberately. May be he was pissed off because of a lame excuse. As I guessed before, may be he takes too much pride in the quality in his product and doesn't expect some newbie mistake from an experience developer.
I'm not saying that he has the right to do so but its not like he goes around yelling on random maintainers for any minor screw up. No he doesn't.
Sarah is complaining on behalf of other people while 'those' other people are busy learning from their mistakes and doing their work. That I don't understand and that is my question.
Quote:
Oh? And how are you 'pretty sure'? They may not have said anything, and may have just said "You know what? Linus can kiss my a**...I'll work on another project", and the Linux development team lost a talented programmer because of his attitude. The guy may have emailed him personally and told him so as well.
May be I could have said I hope, in spite of pretty sure. But we are still to see Mouro's involvement in that mailing list stating that Linus was wrong when he told him to shut up and correct his mistake. He knows he was as fault and Linus was pissed. From the mailing list in question, I even see some maintainer coming up front and stating he has no issues with Linus yelling on his because of some communication gap. It happens to the best of us.
Now somebody quoted his response to RedHat on deep-throating Microsoft, well that's not relevant from where I see it. Its his opinion like everybody else has.
Regards.
Last edited by PrinceCruise; 07-27-2013 at 11:30 AM.
We were here and not totally aware of the situation for Sarah until she brought it to our attention. As to Linus's actions, I have been aware of his antics for a long time. Do I approve of his style, No.
Not a professional from my standard, not talking about his abilities to code but abilities to properly manage.
Distribution: Debian Wheezy, Jessie, Sid/Experimental, playing with LFS.
Posts: 2,900
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by onebuck
Hi,
We were here and not totally aware of the situation for Sarah until she brought it to our attention. As to Linus's actions, I have been aware of his antics for a long time. Do I approve of his style, No.
Not a professional from my standard, not talking about his abilities to code but abilities to properly manage.
Totally agree. There was a spate of Linus rant threads a while ago, so much so that I suggested a Linus rant mega thread was created because the same people were discussing the same topic in multiple threads. His behaviour is not new, his behaviour is not professional, and his behaviour is quite unbecoming for someone in charge of the development of something like the Linux Kernel.
Don't take me wrong here sir, I have immense respect for the females but I really hate to say as I see it this whole drama is getting unnecessary attention for the same reason, being her a female developer. My question still remains the same, where were all you guys before she decided to complain of what she hasn't experienced still?
Now, regarding the Mouro's incident, from where I see it, Linus first explained in that email what's wrong with the code and what to fix and what Mouro chose to ignore deliberately. May be he was pissed off because of a lame excuse. As I guessed before, may be he takes too much pride in the quality in his product and doesn't expect some newbie mistake from an experience developer.
I'm not saying that he has the right to do so but its not like he goes around yelling on random maintainers for any minor screw up. No he doesn't.
Sarah is complaining on behalf of other people while 'those' other people are busy learning from their mistakes and doing their work. That I don't understand and that is my question.
May be I could have said I hope, in spite of pretty sure. But we are still to see Mouro's involvement in that mailing list stating that Linus was wrong when he told him to shut up and correct his mistake. He knows he was as fault and Linus was pissed. From the mailing list in question, I even see some maintainer coming up front and stating he has no issues with Linus yelling on his because of some communication gap. It happens to the best of us.
Now somebody quoted his response to RedHat on deep-throating Microsoft, well that's not relevant from where I see it. Its his opinion like everybody else has.
Regards.
How do you know Mauro was wrong on that code part?
How do you know Mauro was wrong on that code part?
PS ... he wasn't.
You're saying -ENOENT is somehow a valid return code for ioctl calls?
And Linus Torvalds was wrong when he said:
Quote:
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.
ENOENT is defined in errno-base.h as:
Code:
5 #define ENOENT 2 /* No such file or directory */
You're saying -ENOENT is somehow a valid return code for ioctl calls?
And Linus Torvalds was wrong when he said:
ENOENT is defined in errno-base.h as:
Code:
5 #define ENOENT 2 /* No such file or directory */
Is the comment wrong as well?
No.
It was never used (or even meant to be used) for that in the first place.
...and certainly not for userspace.
As it turned out:
*It was a kernel regression
*Linus did apologise.
*Mauro apologised for his lacking communication as well.
*If your distro is up-to-date, you're already using Mauro's fix.
And yet that's presicely what the initial commit by Mauro did.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jens
It was never used (or even meant to be used) for that in the first place.
...and certainly not for userspace.
What do you mean by that? The issue was about the kernel returning an error code for an ioctl call. Of course userspace applications don't return these errors, nobody ever said they did. But the error codes are obviously returned to and handled by userspace applications; they're usually the ones doing the ioctl calls in the first place!
An application in userspace may make certain assumptions about error codes from system calls, like expecting them to be at least vaguely related to the operation in question. If they're not, the application may not know how to handle them. And if the kernel used to return meaningful error codes but suddenly starts doing the opposite, it's likely to cause breakage in userspace.
Here's an analogy: You (Pulseaudio) go to the bank to make a withdrawal (ioctl), but end up getting into a loud argument with the teller (kernel). When the branch manager (Mauro) appears to see what's going on, he insists the breakdown in communications is all your fault, as you shouldn't have raised your voice when the teller rejected your withdrawal slip with the words "I'm sorry, but we're all out of milk."
Quote:
Originally Posted by jens
As it turned out:
*It was a kernel regression
*Linus did apologise.
*Mauro apologised for his lacking communication as well.
*If your distro is up-to-date, you're already using Mauro's fix.
There was a bug here, but the proposed fix contained an even worse bug, which is what resulted in the heated exchange. Nobody uses the original patch, because it was wrong and was replaced by something that wasn't.
Even if ENOENT had been a valid response to an ioctl call (which it isn't), Mauro would still be wrong to change it if the bug had existed for long enough that userspace applications would likely depend on it, by means of a workaround or otherwise. That's what Torvalds meant by "we do not break userspace". See the recent 8250 kernel option rename issue for an example of a bug that has to be kept alive because userspace applications may rely on it.
It was never used (or even meant to be used) for that in the first place.
...and certainly not for userspace.
I'm sorry, I don't exactly get this(?)
And I'm no expert in kernel programming, just a newbie, still I could refer errno-base.h and tell why Linus was upset, may be your can better explain why he's not?
Quote:
*It was a kernel regression
Isn't that what I said? But Mauro decided to consider this a user-space bug.
Regards.
EDIT: Sit_Olmy beat me hands down, I'm such a slow typist.
And yet that's presicely what the initial commit by Mauro did.
What do you mean by that? The issue was about the kernel returning an error code for an ioctl call. Of course userspace applications don't return these errors, nobody ever said they did. But the error codes are obviously returned to and handled by userspace applications; they're usually the ones doing the ioctl calls in the first place!
An application in userspace may make certain assumptions about error codes from system calls, like expecting them to be at least vaguely related to the operation in question. If they're not, the application may not know how to handle them. And if the kernel used to return meaningful error codes but suddenly starts doing the opposite, it's likely to cause breakage in userspace.
Here's an analogy: You (Pulseaudio) go to the bank to make a withdrawal (ioctl), but end up getting into a loud argument with the teller (kernel). When the branch manager (Mauro) appears to see what's going on, he insists the breakdown in communications is all your fault, as you shouldn't have raised your voice when the teller rejected your withdrawal slip with the words "I'm sorry, but we're all out of milk."
There was a bug here, but the proposed fix contained an even worse bug, which is what resulted in the heated exchange. Nobody uses the original patch, because it was wrong and was replaced by something that wasn't.
Even if ENOENT had been a valid response to an ioctl call (which it isn't), Mauro would still be wrong to change it if the bug had existed for long enough that userspace applications would likely depend on it, by means of a workaround or otherwise. That's what Torvalds meant by "we do not break userspace". See the recent 8250 kernel option rename issue for an example of a bug that has to be kept alive because userspace applications may rely on it.
Seriously, this is a "done" issue (it ***was*** regression).
That part was only a rather cruel fix supposed to work in that particular module (forced because of a kernel bug) and nothing else.
Ugly? ... Yes.
Mauro's fault? ... No.
Anyway, I only brought that up because it clearly shows how Linus' replies are the only ones people seem to read.
Seriously, this is a "done" issue (it ***was*** regression).
That part was only a rather cruel fix supposed to work in that particular module (forced because of a kernel bug) and nothing else.
Ugly? ... Yes.
Mauro's fault? ... No.
Why are you quoting my entire post if you're not going to address a single point in it?
So far you've agreed that the error code returned was wrong, but you're saying that this somehow wasn't Mauro's fault. Fine, we'll agree to disagree and leave it at that.
So someone is rude and obnoxious and behaves like an idiot on the Internet. That's hardly news and has nothing to do with Linus Torvalds, the LKML, Sarah Sharp or this particular issue/incident.
Good to see this individual named and shamed, but Sarah's seriously wrong if she thinks this is related to Linus Torvalds. She could ask anyone involved with any high profile project who has a blog or a publicly known mail address (or even an open Facebook page) for a quick look at their inbox. I swear sometimes it looks like somebody's piped a sewer line directly into their mail client.
Edit: Forget what I said about "named and shamed". I was probably completely wrong. The mail address is sufficiently anonymous that nobody is actually being "named", and if the person behind it is a troll, having the mail posted on Sarah's G+ page would actually be a major victory.
Unlike Torvalds' behavior, the anonymous troll e-mail Sharp received is inexcusable under any circumstances. If it can be traced to a person who also works on the Linux kernel in any way (if anyone near Torvalds's position cared, all they have to do is check whether polybun@polyhead.net is the known address of a Linux kernel developer), that person should be "fired." "Dumb c**t" would not be tolerated in most nonprofit organizations, so why shouldn't Linux developers oppose it? Even if I hadn't read the comments on Sharp's page, I would feel confident her attitude toward communication has more supporters than Torvalds', especially since publishing the troll e-mail.
P.S. I expect the troll is most likely male, but I'm not naive enough to think it couldn't be a woman. That would be interesting, in that it would affect Sharp's supporters' use of the word "misogynistic"--not its validity but the sociopolitics involved.
Last edited by newbiesforever; 07-29-2013 at 01:30 PM.
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