Linus Torvalds pointed out bad kernel code
Introspection of Linus Torvalds regains control of Linux 4.20 or 5.0 development. In the communication with the kernel developers, the once-famous father of Linux began to be polite, just pointing out the mistake and not using some words that rebuke the abusive nature. For example, a developer submitted a pull request driven by the BigBen game controller, setting the default to start a new driver. Linus Torvalds has long disapproved of the kernel driver when the driver is enabled by default. He politely opposes it.
He explained:
We do *not* enable new random drivers by default. And we most *definitely* don’t do it when they are odd-ball ones that most people have never heard of.Yet the new “BigBen Interactive” driver that was added this merge window did exactly that.
Just don’t do it.
Yes, yes, every developer always thinks that _their_ driver is so special and so magically important that it should be enabled by default. But no. When we have thousands of drivers, we don’t randomly pick one new driver to be enabled by default just because some developer thinks it is special. It’s not.
So the
default !EXPERT
was completely wrong in commit 256a90ed9e46 (“HID: hid-bigbenff: driver for BigBen Interactive PS3OFMINIPAD gamepad”). Please don’t do things like this.
For other code issues, Torvalds also performed very patiently, in which Linus responded tactfully that “What makes me *very* unhappy about this is that if I’m right, I think it means that code was literally not tested at all by anybody who didn’t have one of the entries in that list.”
Via: Phoronix
