Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, announced the Linux 6.12-rc2 kernel and paid special attention to how to properly write commit notes on GitHub about changes to the kernel. This was reported by The Register.
He is not satisfied with the fact that many programmers use the passive voice in English when describing changes in updates. The developer tries to be consistent in describing new features and uses the active voice everywhere.
”I try to make my merge commit messages "cohesive" by editing the pull request language to "match a more standard layout and language. It's not a big deal, and often it's literally just about whitespace so that we don't have 15 different indentation models and bullet syntaxes. Igenerally do it as I read through the text anyway, so it's not like it
makes extra work for me.”
”But what *does* make extra work is when some maintainers use passive voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation,” Torvalds writes.
The use of passive constructions in sentence construction is common in scientific papers and technical documentation. And such text may indeed look somewhat complicated and confusing.
”I'd love it if people would avoid writing theirdescriptions as "In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling
was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference".
Instead write it as "This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in .."
”This is not a big deal, I realize. But I happened to try to rewrite a
few of these cases the last week, and I think simple and to-the-point
language is better.”
Although it may seem like Torvalds is being too picky about details, this is actually a very mild remark from him. In 2016, he called for "mentally retarded developers with shit for brains" to stop using drugs and use asterisks (the "*" symbol) normally.
It seems that Linus Torvalds is becoming a better version of himself over the years.