First of all, let me say your accomplishments are amazing.
The Sparc port, now an SGI port... wow.
There's Kernighan, Ritchie, Torvalds, Wall, Schwartz, Stevens, ..., Miller,
Osterhout, Christiansen, ..., my buddies Matt, Jeff, Andrew, Shawn, Scott,
Me, ..., my 12 year old cousin, ..., and Bill Gates.
;-)
I leave the entire message unmodified for context...
> >./arch/sparc/kernel/sunos_ioctl.c: /* Binary compatibility is good
> >American know how fuckin' up. */
>
> Either @#$%in' or screwin' up.
>
>I am defiantly against making our comment vents look like a Beatle
>Baily comic strip baloon text.
>
>The UFS message is clearly to go, but removing the comments would be
>insane.
>
>(oh and as for corporate source tree's worrying about this, they
> indeed do for the people who buy source licenses from them, there
> are groups of people who scan the tree snapshots they release and
> grep out profanity etc., one cool one that got through was that the
> architecture in question had a common set of 3 instruction sequences
> that were easier to code if macro'ized, they alway came in the
> sequence A; A; A; B; B; B;, they did #define BLOW A; A; A; and
> #define JOB B; B; B;, they put the defines in two different header
> files, and the committee overlooked the particular assembler files
> these were used in, the joke got past the committee as intended ;-)
In one paragraph you say you're against replacing curses with %(*^, and
in the very next, you say that reputable companies make an effort to take
them out when they DO distribute source.
So, if we're going to make our source freely distributed, don't you think
we should have the same considerations that our friends at Sun or SGI or
BSDI do? I mean your point is nice in that it is an anecdote about a
humorous (IMO) situation where they MISSED it, but the point is that
"respected" companies are pulling out the profanities, and we should too.
Remember, although we may feel like our sensibilities are not offended by
this, some very GNU-philosophy (free software/source) people may be far
more religious or conservative about the use of curses in the sources.
The right to swing your fist ends where my face begins, no? (I'm hoping we
can agree to that)
All I'm arguing is that with a "shared source code" that some Linux
developers and others interested in helping out may be offended by the more
extreme statements. I'm assuming your argument, then, is that where you
believe you have put your fist is not where you believe my face to be.
In that case, I can surely point out a end user, a linux developer, or
someone on the street who would find those comments offensive. Consider if
you were writing the source for Linus's mother to look over. Would you
still not consider changing it?
Just some items to make you think of it from my point of view. I could
*personally* care less, I think the comments are funny as is!
-Khan