1995! Really? That's your reference?

I started getting involved in kernel development around 2003. I remember it was a very toxic environment even then. There was constant flame wars, and I swear, people were having contests about who could insult the other better. Yes, even back then (10 years ago) the Linux kernel mailing list was very much so a toxic environment.

But then something happened.

Companies got involved. Developers started having families and maturing. By 2011, LKML was a much more professional environment, and continues to move in that direction. The nasty insult is much more the exception than the norm. It's been years since I've seen a flame war on LKML.

In other words, this isn't your daddy's kernel environment.

I happen to be the one that made the comment that "Linus scares me more than Greg", which started the thread that Sarah had her rant with. The whole thread was rather harmless, but because Ingo and Linus were telling Greg he needed to be a bit tougher and not accept patches to the stable tree so easily, caused Sarah to have her rant. But he needed to be tougher! There was a reason that I would label patches "stable" and not send it to Linus. Because those patches perhaps didn't meet the standard of a "stable" patch. But since Greg was such a nice guy, I knew I could get that in through him, and possibly not through Linus.

I could imagine back in `95 the kernel community not being such a nice place to interact in. Same goes for `05. But for `15, things have improved so much so that even when we had a developer almost seemingly trying to get bad patches into the kernel, and never listening to the advice given to him from the maintainers (and even Sarah herself was critical on this person), he was denied in an extremely polite and civil tone.

Is this a joke? Or is it someone just trying to push their ideology of what they think should be done to the rest of the world to make their idea a standard?

Wow, that was my same response when I upgraded my box and Gnome3 was installed (removing my very customized setup of Gnome2).

I love mc!

I use it all the time for patch management. One little tidbit that most people do not know about mc is that you can cd into a patch. Edit the diffs in the patch, and copy a diff from one patch to another patch file, just like copying or moving a file.