Over the weekend, the second release candidate of Linux 6.12 was released with all the latest features and fixes added since the first release candidate a week prior. Accompanying the release of the software was the usual commentary on the Linux kernel mailing list by Linux founder Linus Torvalds.
This week, he started by explaining that RC2 releases tend to be smaller, but he decided to run the numbers over previous RC2 releases and found that they're only smaller about half the time. He said that this release was one of the bigger releases, but nothing seemed too odd; with RC3 next week, he expects more driver updates.
Instead of leaving the email there, he unpacked a peeve he had about the commit messages some developers were sending in accompanying the changes they had made. Apparently, the language being used is too passive instead of active.
Explaining his discontent in his own words, Torvalds said:
"I try to make my merge commit messages be somewhat "cohesive", and so I often edit the pull request language to match a more standard layout and language. It's not a big deal, and often it's literally just about whitespace so that we don't have fifteen different indentation models and bullet syntaxes. I generally do it as I read through the text anyway, so it's not like it makes extra work for me.
But what does make extra work is when some maintainers use passive voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation (or, admittedly, sometimes I just decide I don't care quite enough about trying to make the messages sound the same).
So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative."
Giving an example of a bad commit message, Torvalds provided this example: "In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference." He believes this should have been written as follows: "This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..."
Thankfully for those developers without the greatest literary skills, Torvalds said this is not a big deal. He just said he noticed this issue while trying to rewrite a few commit messages to better fit his preference for the active voice.
Linux 6.12 will be released around mid-to-late November after around seven release candidates have come out. It will be interesting to see what Linus Torvalds has to say between then and now.
Source: Linux kernel mailing list via Phoronix
1 Comment - Add comment