So, I just went on GitHub to take a look at opens PR, and most of them are trolls

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Nimi142@reddit

Linux doesn't use GitHub for merges, patches are supplied by mail.

Open any PR, it's an automated response to every one that is opened. This is why you don't see actual changes there.

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Sentreen@reddit

This question got asked quite a few times. Here is Greg KH discussing why.

A few excerpts:

On the other hand, GitHub does not scale to larger projects. He pointed at the Kubernetes project, which has over 4,000 open issues and 511 open pull requests. The system, he said, does not work well for large numbers of reviewers. It has a reasonable mechanism for discussion threads attached to pull requests — GitHub has duplicated email for that feature, he said — but only the people who are actually assigned to a pull request can see that thread. GitHub also requires online access, but there are a lot of kernel developers who, for whatever reason, do not have good access to the net while they are working. In general, it is getting better, but projects like Kubernetes are realizing that they need to find something better suited to their scale; it would never work for the kernel.

...

In summary, Greg said, email matters because it is simple, supports the widest group, and is scalable. But the most important thing is that it grows the community. When new developers come in, the first thing they have to do is to learn how the project works. That includes reading the reviews that developers are doing; that is how one learns what developers care about and how to avoid mistakes. With the kernel, those reviews are right there on the mailing list for all to see; with a system like Gerrit, one has to work to seek them out.

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adenosine-5@reddit

Wouldn't scaling be a non-issue if the code base got separated into individual repositories?

AFAIK you could use separate repositories for individual components, which would solve the entire "too many issues at one place" issue, wouldn't it?

GitHub also requires online access

I don't understand this point either - emails also require online access. In both cases you can work entirely offline and only need internet to push the changes.

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When you receive an email in your desktop client inbox you store a copy locally including the attachments (patches). If you boot up your computer with no internet you can still read all of the threads that were received the last time you had internet. That's not the case for GitHub. If you boot up your computer with no internet you can't see GitHub threads until you are back online.

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adenosine-5@reddit

If I understand correctly you mean pulling all remote branches locally? Git can do that of course.

From the top of my head I dont know if git fetch does what you are saying or if you would need some simple script to pull each branch.

You can even create git alias for that, so you could do that comfortably

Also - since git is open-source - it wouldnt be a problem to add a command to do that.

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ancientGouda@reddit

They're talking about all the infrastructure around the repository. PRs, issues, comments etc. Everything not managed by git itself.

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adenosine-5@reddit

In that case git could be changed to incorporate those as well, no?

Not to mention that people without any access to internet are probably not much of a thing these days.

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foghornjawn@reddit

git could be changed to incorporate those as well

And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike.

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adenosine-5@reddit

Git was created for Linux development.

So sorry, but if a trivial function like "comments" is preventing its proper full use for Linux development, its something that should (and could) be easily fixed.

You can already add empty commits with a commit message as a (rather clumsy) workaround.

This sounds more like people looking for excuses not to change their workflow they are used to.

"Oh we would just LOVE to use Git repository, but... darn... oh noooo... git doesnt have comments... well... what can we do? Literally nothing. I guess we will stick with the method we're used to for like ever... There is just no way to make it work."

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ancientGouda@reddit

That would lead to quite the scope creep. Git is a software (or text) versioning tool, it's not a full forge suite and doesn't attempt to be.

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adenosine-5@reddit

On a second though you are right - there is no need for separate "offline comment" feature - you could simply add "comments.txt" file to every patch and have the discussion there.

It would be much cleaner solution and you would have all the features of emails and thanks to things like "blame" could easily facilitate comments from multiple people.

And removing the file before final merge is trivial, because that functionality is in git as well.

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PotatoFuryR@reddit

Linux does use Git fully and properly, as you said - git was created for Linux development.

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adenosine-5@reddit

We are talking about patches delivered over archaic emails, instead of proper modern infrastructure.

Do I really have to spell everything into excruciating detail in every comment just so no one will have the overwhelming need to "correct" things?

Arguments given were:

linux is too big (which doesnt make sense, because you can easily split the code into multiple repositories)
git doesnt work offline (which it does)
git doesnt have offline comments (which would be trivial to implement)

So far there has not been a single argument that would be anything else than "we are used to doing things this way".

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ali1234@reddit

When new developers come in, the first thing they have to do is to learn how the project works.

How the project works: stop using whatever email client you use now. Switch to one that has been abandoned for over 20 years. Or we won't talk to you.

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kmikolaj@reddit

Look up :D

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klyith@reddit

because Linus has been managing the linux kernel via email since long before github existed

also, since before git existed

because he wrote git to manage the kernel

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SilentLennie@reddit

Github is the wrong working model as well (especially in his opinion)

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cyb3rofficial@reddit

it would be funnier if they were supplied by snail mail via floppy

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druidniam@reddit

I got a patch for Red Hat V1.1 in the mail on a floppy disk way back forever ago.

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zylian@reddit

I feel like even in those days it would have been faster and cheaper to have simply sent it over the internet

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PAJW@reddit

In 1995, the state of the art was a 19.2kbps modem. But even so, the contents of a single 1.44MB floppy diskette could be downloaded in 10-15 minutes.

TL;DR: Yeah, you're right.

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Ok-Bill3318@reddit

I was there. In 1995 it was 28.8

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druidniam@reddit

It would have been from their BBS rather than the internet, but I didn't know I would be getting a patch in the mail. At the time, I was next day mail from Raleigh, NC which might be why they sent one.

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wired-one@reddit

Sounds like the crew back in the day.

We still do stuff like this for some customers.

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CosmackMagus@reddit

Back in my day we got linux updates from magazines

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Comic_Melon@reddit

I would prefer they be printed out or converted to punch cards

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cgoldberg@reddit

hand written on parchment and delivered by carrier pigeon?

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docentmark@reddit

IP over carrier pigeon, obviously. I’m sure someone here can quote the number of the RFC.

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cgoldberg@reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/ByyjJDNZve

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Comic_Melon@reddit

Y'all got Pigeons? I just send my bud Fred over by horse.

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cgoldberg@reddit

I'm sure Fred is very efficient, but due to compliance rules, I have to use pigeons because there is an official spec:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149

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thewaytonever@reddit

You should be using RFC2549 instead.

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InvisibleTextArea@reddit

No no no. RFC6214 is the modern implementation.

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Novero95@reddit

How does that work? Does it imply that Linus has to manually copy paste things into the next release source code? I know that's how Linux has been developed since the beginning and it has done its job but doesn't seem to be the most efficient in this days.

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Ybalrid@reddit

get the patch file out of the email, use this command https://git-scm.com/docs/git-apply

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polongus@reddit

nah just git am

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Ybalrid@reddit

Ah! I see that it will directly apply patches from the mailbox

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polongus@reddit

yup. good to remember git was literally written by Linus for kernel development, so if his workflow seems clunky there's probably something you're missing.

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Ybalrid@reddit

thankfully all projects I am involved with uses more modern tools than emails

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oxez@reddit

I'd rather not work with people who can't work unless there's shiny buttons anywhere.

I'm sure the projects you are involved in are real world projects used by thousands, and definitely not javascript bullshit or wheel-reinventing "written in Rust" crap

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Ybalrid@reddit

I'm a software engineer for a company called LIV https://www.liv.tv/ that makes video composition software for virtual reality https://store.steampowered.com/app/755540/LIV/

If you have seen pretty much any video of the video game "Beat Saber", "Gorilla Tag", and many adverts for video games sold for the Meta Quest headset, we're involved.

The codebases I am involved with are mixes of C++, C#, and, yes, believe it or not, Rust.

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Western_Objective209@reddit

I would prefer email to JIRA at this point

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Ybalrid@reddit

we self host GitLab EE

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Western_Objective209@reddit

I haven't tried GitLab yet, but we have both JIRA and GitHub and it seems like GitHub can do everything JIRA does but less convoluted

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Firewolf06@reddit

i would prefer writing my patches out by hand and sending them by carrier pigeon over jira

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polongus@reddit

you millenials

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blackmesaind@reddit

All serious software engineering tasks are done via TikTok interpretive dance

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crazedizzled@reddit

It's still clunky. I mean he makes it work, but it's definitely clunky.

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oxez@reddit

it's definitely clunky

Do you have an example of a kernel that's developed in the open that uses something that's not "clunky" ?

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Espumma@reddit

Developing on that scale will never not be clunky

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TimurHu@reddit

There is no manual copy paste. Git automates 99% of the process, it only needs manual intervention when there are merge conflicts.

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LudwikTR@reddit

To add to this: Git was explicitly created by Linus to support kernel development. It has much more direct, built-in support for his mail-centered workflow than GitHub’s pull request-centered flow.

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Novero95@reddit

that makes more sense

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ronchaine@reddit

Git was designed to work with email. git-send-mail, and git-am do good bunch of the work.

And to be honest, when – on the rare occasion – everyone has the setup done and knows how to work with email git, I might prefer it to web forges. That workflow makes some things super simple and fast, though I wouldn't force it on anyone.

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kalzEOS@reddit

By USPS in an envelope. It has to be an A4 paper, too. I sent one the other day and Linus said it was "fucking garbage" and will make humanity worse.

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zack6849@reddit

I could see him uploading a video of him feeding your bad code to a shredder

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Kwpolska@reddit

Couldn't the bot that posts the comment also close the PR?

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Zoddo98@reddit

This has been discussed, they can't because the bot doesn't have any permission in the repo.

And probably, nobody wants to annoy Linus with this (or Linus doesn't care enough).

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Kwpolska@reddit

Couldn't the bot that posts the comment also close the PR?

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ElderPimpx@reddit

Isn't calling attention to trolls the least productive option?

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boar-b-que@reddit

The people who complain about open source projects being 'woke' amaze me.

'At what point did you miss that open source software was a cultural movement?'

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gatornatortater@reddit

If you're referring to the 4th one, then I think that person has the opposite opinion.

I agree with you though. It is interesting to see all the people who are unaware that foss is based on anarchism.

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DarkShadow4444@reddit

Linux doesn't use GitHub PRs, so I guess none moderates them

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defel@reddit

while it is possible to disable issues, you cant disable PRs for a repo

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Shaken_Earth@reddit

Does GitHub have a good reason for this? That seems pretty silly.

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defel@reddit

Beside the business strategy that the git workflow should be centralized on GitHub and not be done like those long-haired anarchists using 'git send-email'? No, I don't think so ..

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Shaken_Earth@reddit

I think it would be able to turn off pull requests for a project where you want to release the code for others to use and fork but you have absolutely no intention of trying to integrate anyone's ideas or improvements. Just "here's this gift. If you want to do something with it, great. If you don't then just ignore it."

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GwanTheSwans@reddit

you don't have to host on github to make a public readonly git repo that anyone can clone from. Microsoft / github have done a "good" job of selling the illusion to corporate types and masses of people that git is a branch-based centralised vcs like cvs+svn ....when it very much is not, the model is everyone clones repos. repo-based DVCS.

You can host your own cgit, gitolite, etc, on a vps somewhere, they're in debian.

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/cgit

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/gitolite3

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Aggressive_Pie_4585@reddit

That can be done with a README file and turning off emails.

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LeonardMH@reddit

That's wild

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SpiderFnJerusalem@reddit

Bit of an issue that nobody noticed and disabled the function, though. Doesn't exactly look good.

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zarlo5899@reddit

i think a total of 3 have been accepted

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Booty_Bumping@reddit

None of them were actually merged via Github. Instead, it was random people monitoring the mailing lists and submitting a branch from a kernel developer that was about to be merged, then Github automatically detected that the commit hash had been merged and marked the PR accordingly.

In a few rare cases, it was the developer themselves duplicating their PR to Github, perhaps as a party trick (as it would be rather rare to be confused enough to submit to Github first, but competent enough to be able to prepare a mergable kernel contribution).

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Preisschild@reddit

Maybe not only for a party trick, but also to show you have kernel development experience, as many people use their GH profile as a CV

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DelusionalPianist@reddit

Purely judging from what I do myself: Create a PR in a nice WebUI for reviewing, or perhaps for talking to some other people where a link is more accepted than a .patch file.

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botle@reddit

Here's a video of Italians singing it while going through a West Bank checkpoint: https://youtu.be/Zd-AKmjhJTw

If those guards knew what it was they'd be upset.

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intersectRaven@reddit

That's just a mirror for the real git repository of Linux. Linux development still uses the old mailing list and not pull/merge requests of modern git. And yes, those are trolls since it's not really used. If I remember correctly though there was one issue that got Linus attention but that's it.

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Specialist-Delay-199@reddit

I remember correctly though there was one issue that got Linus attention but that's it.

Okay now you sparked my attention what was it

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intersectRaven@reddit

If I remember correctly, he just responded that he doesn't do pull requests and the reason why. Not really sure since it was a long time ago. I could search later when I have time but it's more likely I'll forget again after I eat dinner and wash everything.

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meditonsin@reddit

Iirc one of the reasons he doesn't like Github pull requests is because they are opiniated about the formatting of commit messages (line lengths and such).

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AndrewNeo@reddit

to clarify for others, they as in the kernel. Github won't enforce anything on commit messages

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meditonsin@reddit

Actually went and looked it up, because I could've sworn it was the other way around for some reason. But you are, in fact, correct. (Sauce)

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intersectRaven@reddit

Not to mention your patch needs to be pulled to the appropriate trees not in master. Plus the maintainers need to be notified. Plus all sorts of processes. Also, even though it's archaic, it's been made a lot simpler using scripts in the tools folder. When I made my first OSS contribution, the main difficulty was getting the attention and approval of the right person for looking at the patch. In my case, one of the maintainers was familiar with the device so it got through after a few weeks. For my other patch it never got through since it's a pretty niche device. Didn't resubmit since I found my patch made a wrong assumption so it's better as is.

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IAm_A_Complete_Idiot@reddit

Fwiw GitHub has a thing called CODEOWNERS now which specifies who owns what part of the repo, so a similar workflow for notifications and the like isn't too hard to build on GitHub.

There's also a lot of subtrees that work on GitHub - I think the DRM people work on GitLab for instance, and the rust folks on GitHub. It's mostly just preference of the specific subtree, and the "last merge" where a maintainer submits something to linus.

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tagattack@reddit

Not modern git, GitHub specifically.

Pull requests are specific to GitHub, built on top of git, but nothing to do with the git project per-se.

Pull requests are fundamentally flawed

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674

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donjulioanejo@reddit

I don't know man, improving syscall via Labubu seems promising.

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No-Highlight-653@reddit

For information purposes here is the Linux kernel git: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/

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Infiniti_151@reddit

Weren't there some Indian techtubers suggesting their viewers to make open source contributions to boost their resume? One example is Shraddha Khapra (Apna College on YT). There were hundreds of PRs from her students on ExpressJS as she had used that repo in her video as an example and the maintainers had to lock it down for a while as they hadn't faced something like this before. This was like an year ago and this post reminds me of that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1al49pf/expressjs_faces_an_influx_of_spam_pull_requests/

https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1akh9ll/a_wave_of_spam_pull_requests_on_a_famous_open/

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AndrewNeo@reddit

a friend was a maintainer on the 2048 repo and they'd always get flake PRs because some class used them as an test project

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neoronio20@reddit

There was a post on programmer humor about making the kernel more cute with a print of a PR with ASCII art. Guess reddit went there and opened more PRs

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aukkras@reddit

Imagine thinking that kernel devs use inferior tech that is github.

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chibiace@reddit

linus is the one who created git. he named it after himself.

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aukkras@reddit

Imagine thinking that git and github are the same thing.

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icehuck@reddit

Trust me, there are tons and tons of new developers who don't know they're different.

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ImClaaara@reddit

He did, and the linux kernel uses git. They do not, however, use Github, which is a specific website that uses git in its backend. The linux kernel is mirrored there, but the actual git instance for linux kernel development is not hosted on Github.

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chibiace@reddit

indeed, github also has some extras.

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BlameMyMuse@reddit

Not all trolls - the third one in your screenshot is obviously Richard Stallman.

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WSuperOS@reddit

Omg you reminded me of the "I am new to Github and I have lots to say". Cracks me up every time.

Thank you, internet stranger.

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MairusuPawa@reddit

It really became the LinkedIn of development eh

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BlackMarketUpgrade@reddit

The readus one made me chuckle

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slade51@reddit

I laughed way too much at that comment about renaming to “READUS”!

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reini_urban@reddit

Trolls are still better than LLM PR's. They are still at least funny, whilst LLM are just like Indian PR's from your kindergarten. You don't want to argue with them really

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Hytht@reddit

Russian bots

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PlayerIO-@reddit

Proof?

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Pugs-r-cool@reddit

Probably not bots, but when Russian contributions were blocked in Linux kernel (and they continue to be blocked to this day), the github repo became a place where Russian users would go and complain. It's not as common nowadays, but if you go back you'll find plenty of examples.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1261

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1088

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1072

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1071

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1030

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1087/commits/52c957f9e9de43767d1e07093fa8845780a12a14

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1017

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Hytht@reddit

Frequency increased after russian maintainers were delisted from the kernel

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Potential_Penalty_31@reddit

The labubu one make me crack a smile

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Pugs-r-cool@reddit

The linux PRs on github have always been trolls.

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polongus@reddit

internets be trollin. first time?

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githman@reddit

Not necessary trolls, no. Just special.

Sometimes I look at this or that post (on Reddit or elsewhere) and think that no way a guy with IQ high enough to use a computer would write this. Then I read on and realize that it was actually written in good faith by a live person. They just did not think their opinion through.

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