Linus Has Had Enough Of Links That Point To ‘stupid Useless Garbage’

The latest release candidate for Linux is out, but before its release, Linus Torvalds had something he wanted to get off his chest in his usual style.

“Stop this garbage already. Stop adding pointless Link arguments that waste people’s time,” he wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list.

“Add the link if it has *ADDITIONAL* information. Dammit, I really hate those pointless links. I love seeing *useful* links, but 99 percent of the links I actually see just point to stupid useless garbage, and it *ONLY* wastes my time. AGAIN.”

He explained that links must provide some useful explanation about why a particular commit was made, not just repeat messages people had already posted.

“I do suspect I would be a lot *less* annoyed by a link that at least leads to some _thread_ (and not just the acked-by emails that already got gathered up), rather than just leading to an email that was applied and nobody really had any input on,” he said. “At least at that point I’d feel like there’s something real there.”

That said, the work must go on, and developers released Linux 6.17-rc5 over the weekend, with plans to release the full 6.17 build in the next month or so. The next iteration will have better memory management, improved Rust toolchain support, and broader hardware coverage for AMD and Intel silicon, in the latter case adding Chipzilla’s Bartlett Lake platform to the PMC driver, alongside other x86 quirks.

On the plus side, Torvalds said 6.17-rc5 looked normal otherwise. And he admitted, “Yes, I’m grumpy.”

“I feel like my main job – really my only job – is to try to make sense of pull requests, and that’s why I absolutely detest these things that are automatically added and only make my job harder.” ®

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