Linus Torvalds annoyed by passive language in commit messages

The latest release candidate of Linux 6.12 was announced over the weekend, promoting some comments about grammar from Linux founder Linus Torvalds. He took the opportunity to express some irritation when developers use passive, rather than active, language in their commit messages, which he believes is less clear, Neowin reports. A commit message is a short description that developers write when they save changes to a version control system.

“I try to make my merge-commit messages reasonably ‘coherent’, so I often edit the pull request language to fit a more standardized layout and language usage. It’s not a big deal, and most of the time it’s literally just spaces so we don’t have fifteen different indentation models and bulleted list syntaxes,” wrote Torvalds. He continued:

“I usually do it while I’m reading through the text anyway, so it’s not like it’s extra work for me. But what does mean extra work is when some entertainers use passive voice, and then I actively try to rewrite the explanation (or sometimes I just decide I don’t care enough about making messages sound the same). So I would ask entertainers to use active voice, and preferably only imperative.”

Linus Torvalds gives an example of a commit message he doesn’t like: “In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver’s error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference.”

Torvalds instead thinks it should be worded like this: “This fixes a NULL point dereference in …”

Torvalds added that he doesn’t think this is a big deal, but it’s something that developers are welcome to think about.

Linux 6.12 is expected to be released sometime in the second half of November.

This story originally appeared on ComputerSweden.

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