Linus Torvalds Invented Git, But He Pulls No Patches With GitHub

Linus Torvalds keeps a copy of his Linux kernel project on GitHub, the wildly popular coder-hosting website. But there's a caveat. If you try to send him a patch or a bug-fix via GitHub, he'll tell you to take a hike.
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Linus Torvalds keeps a copy of his Linux kernel project on GitHub, the wildly popular code-hosting website. But there's a caveat. If you try to send him a patch or a bug-fix via GitHub, he'll tell you to take a hike.

As he explained on GitHub Friday morning, he does not accept pull requests on GitHub. A pull request is GitHub speak for a suggested code fix, or patch.

The irony is that Torvalds invented Git, the software at the heart of the GitHub website.

Git is cool, but unless you're a Linux kernel hacker, it's hard to use. So in 2007, GitHub came along, and set up an easy-to-use website where coders could host and even manage their software projects using Git.

But in translating Git to the web, the GitHub guys made some technical choices that Torvalds really doesn't like. When someone offers a patch, GitHub doesn't require a valid e-mail address. And it doesn't give him other technical information about the patch that he can get from Git.

As Torvalds delicately put it in a GitHub comment on Friday: "Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but GitHub instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. As a result, I consider GitHub useless for these kinds of things. It's fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage."

Torvalds says he brought up his problems with GitHub's creators, but "they didn't think they mattered."

GitHub couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

In an e-mail interview, Torvalds raved about GitHub's hosting pretty much in proportion to his rant about its pull-request interface.

"The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy."

But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."

Think of it as the open source version of tough love.