>How much damage have Linus's snippy emails really caused
Don't downplay how he acted by using words like "snippy." There are contributors who have either left the project or actively avoid directly talking with him. There is a reason why Linus admitted he had a problem. It wasn't productive or useful.
>But more importantly, I'd actually put some blame on a certain circle of folks that play a major role in kernel development, and first and foremost Linus Torvalds himself. By many he is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one. If he posts words like "[specific folks] ...should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" (google for it), than that's certainly bad. But what I find particularly appalling is the fact that he regularly defends this, and advertises this as an efficient way to run a community. (But it is not just Linus, it's a certain group of people around him who use the exact same style, some of which semi-publically even phantasize about the best ways to, ... well, kill me).
>for prioritizing social pacification over software quality.
Well quite literally it's doing the opposite. Social derisiveness does nothing for the community. That's just one example of many. And of course you had to nitpick about systemd instead of understanding what's being discussed. Missing The Point (TM) 2018. Linux itself isn't really a good example of sane kernel development and architecture. It's popular and it works.
If in a discussion someone brings up a tangent to the topic at hand, please keep the discussion on track by focusing on the current topic rather than the tangent. This is not to say that the tangent is bad, or not interesting to discuss—only that it shouldn't interfere with discussion of the issue at hand. In most cases, it is also off-topic, so those interested ought to discuss it somewhere else.
Systemd, invented by the guy you are quoting, is, however, objectively crap.
I am about to start a separate, new service and have wide leeway in how it will run. I am moving away from Linux towards a mix of BSD and Solaris/Illumos. And Systemd played a part in this technical decision.
Systemd objectively breaks Unix principles. That makes it subjectively "crap", because in your eyes (not in everybody's, and not in a demonstrated superior or inferior way) that's a bad thing. I'm not too sure what's complicated.
And as I was saying to the other poster, calling something "objectively crap" isn't just most of the time wrong, it's almost always inflammatory. "Don't do it" feels like a good rule of thumb here.
Please don't argue unceasingly for your preferred course of action when a decision for some other course has already been made. That tends to block the activity's progress.
Don't downplay how he acted by using words like "snippy." There are contributors who have either left the project or actively avoid directly talking with him. There is a reason why Linus admitted he had a problem. It wasn't productive or useful.
https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...
>But more importantly, I'd actually put some blame on a certain circle of folks that play a major role in kernel development, and first and foremost Linus Torvalds himself. By many he is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one. If he posts words like "[specific folks] ...should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" (google for it), than that's certainly bad. But what I find particularly appalling is the fact that he regularly defends this, and advertises this as an efficient way to run a community. (But it is not just Linus, it's a certain group of people around him who use the exact same style, some of which semi-publically even phantasize about the best ways to, ... well, kill me).