As I wrote the last time this came up:

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Those who only know Linus from his rants might be surprised that here "his usual fashion" means:

- Acknowledging that the root cause was Github's documentation being misleading.

- Not blaming the contributor for being mislead by Github: "I can see why that documentation would make you think it's the right thing to do."

- Admit that the ease with which the accident happened is a deficiency in Git's UI.

- CC the Git maintainer to discuss improving Git to make it harder to do this by accident. (Which eventually lead to the --allow-unrelated-histories flag being needed to do this kind of merge.)

Calling calm and professional response "his usual fashion" isn't a jab :)

All too often people call Linus' rare passionate rants "his usual fashion".

I had the photo of Linus flipping the bird to NVIDIA as my desktop wallpaper for quite a while at a previous job. Used it as a reminder not to commit something stupid (not to Linux - the internal project I was working on at the time).

His previous message in this thread was less polite:

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1603.2/01890.html

That is still not ranting. Linus seems more angry at himself than the person who made the mistake.

Granted, there are some jabs at the user who made the mistake:

> Why did Laxman do that insane merge? Why did it get

> pulled back?

>

> You actually have to work at making shit like this, so I wonder what

> workflow you guys had to make that bad merge.

If you wanna put more spin on this apparently this merge came from Nvidia.

I was just going to comment the same thing. A fairly polite comment to someone who’d added a new root commit to the kernel, acknowledging why that had seemed like a reasonable thing to do and proposing fixes to the people who could implement the fix. Seems ideal to me.