This was an interesting comment thread, and honestly you have to hand it to Linus for continuing to respond and expand on his viewpoints in a pretty level-headed way.<p>Also, I was reading through it on a phone, which brought to light an interesting point regarding the hard line-wrapping discussion that occurs further on down the thread: when you hard-wrap your lines, you're also defining a <i>minimum</i> line width, under which lines break in awful jagged ways.<p>I can understand the rationale for hard-wrapping in commit messages, but it drives me up a wall when people use it in things like email or Markdown documents.
Reasonable people can disagree on things like formatting, features, or the superiority of one interface/product over another... all fair game. And Linus’ contributions give him an enormous amount of credibility and leeway to have it his way. But when you treat people with such disrespect (ex. By calling them a moron), you lose all credibility and respect in my book. There should be no excuse for treating people with disrespect no matter who you are or what your contributions have been. I’m not surprised given his reputation, but I’m still incredibly disappointed
Hard line wraps are moronic, just like spaces for tabs.<p>It’s an abuse of the newline character, which is meant to represent a new line, not word wrapping. It also destroys the information of where actual newlines are placed. There’s no way to automatically strip out the newlines meant for word wrapping, while leaving newlines meant for new lines.<p>To use your words Linus: You’re a moron!
I don’t think Linus is being unreasonable here. He has specific standards he expects.<p>It’s true that his language could be more polite, but what he expects is not a secret.
Curious - why do people get offended by Torvalds? If you know anything about the guy, his rants are a caricature. It's like going for a Tarantino movie and expecting no violence. You're going to get violence. And, it's going to be <i>excessive, over-the-top, ridiculously offensive</i> that there is no other explanation than to treat it as comedy. Any other attempt to explain Linus is flapping wings in a vaccuum. If I was on the receiving end of it, I would play along.
I'm a bit amused that Torvalds is complaining about people submitting non-line-wrapped commit messages even though they look awful when displayed by git because they use a different tool to author them, while submitting line-wrapped comments even though they look awful on the github web interface with proportional fonts because he submits them by email. But of course, it's his repo and he gets to apply whatever style suits him best.