Linus Torvalds plans to pull Paragon Software’s NTFS driver into the 5.15 kernel source. However, he complained about the use of GitHub merge in the submission, saying that it creates “absolutely useless garbage merges.”
Early last month, Torvalds made it known to Paragon Software that it should really submit a pull request (an actual submission of code to be merged into the kernel source) for its read-write NTFS to be included in the awaited version 5.15 release, for which the merge window is still open at the time of writing this.)
NTFS is the native Windows file system. Paragon’s implementation is needed to improve interoperability on that system, which is currently limited in terms of write support.
Paragon submits its pull request
On Friday, Paragon made its pull request saying that the current version works with normal/compressed/sparse files and supports acl, NTFS journal replaying. Even so, Paragon is still figuring out the submission process and Torvalds had several things to say, intended to make future pull requests better.
First, he said the pull request should have been signed, saying in an ideal world, it would be a traceable PGP signature that improves the chain of trust, even though he added he had never actually required it. The father of the Linux kernel also noted that the code in the pull requests included merge commits done with the GitHub web user interface.
He said it was another of those things he *really* doesn’t want to see, during which he commented on GitHub interfaces being useless garbage at merges and should never be used to merge anything. He qualified the statement by calling the platform a ‘perfectly fine hosting site’ that does other things well ‘but merges is not one of those things.’
2 hours ago
