Plenty of people claim that they're scared to contribute because Linus might yell at them. That's unfounded for a lot of reasons.
TL;DR: Test your code before you submit it. Don't accept or acknowledge patches from others that haven't been reviewed or tested. And if you make a mistake, own up quick and he's not going to yell at you. It's pretty simple.
He will occasionally jump in and yell when people aren't accepting responsibility for problems they caused. Especially when they won't accept nicer, less authoritative criticism from their peers.
That's what happened in this case. Check the follow-up message in the thread where Linus explains his dissatisfaction (http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/02507.html). The contributor who caused the regression was caught denying that there was even a regression. His patch had already long been identified as the culprit and reverted. But over the course of three weeks he was insisting that it was not a kernel regression. Essentially he dug in for 22 days saying that it wasn't his problem. And he wasted tons of valuable contributor time where people were nicely telling him that, yes, it was indeed a regression.
Multiple people were telling him about the "don't break userspace" policy and how it was a regression. And yet that contributor was still deflecting responsibility for the problems caused. But the problem is that this patch would leave the distros in the lurch - scrambling to update their configuration before the kernel breaks behavior. And that's without any ETA on their "long term ... flexible solution" (http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/00380.html). Thousands of people with varying levels of technical competency would have had their systems break in unexpected ways.
Quite frankly, he earned the dressing down. And plenty of people tried to be nice to him about it. It just didn't take hold in his mind until Linus dropped in to rudely remind him that even "correct" behavior is a regression if it breaks userspace. Also note that Linus said the issue had been escalated to him. Someone explicitly brought this to his attention because there was a distinct lack of progress due to CYA responsibility deflection.
TL;DR: Test your code before you submit it. Don't accept or acknowledge patches from others that haven't been reviewed or tested. And if you make a mistake, own up quick and he's not going to yell at you. It's pretty simple.
He will occasionally jump in and yell when people aren't accepting responsibility for problems they caused. Especially when they won't accept nicer, less authoritative criticism from their peers.
That's what happened in this case. Check the follow-up message in the thread where Linus explains his dissatisfaction (http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/02507.html). The contributor who caused the regression was caught denying that there was even a regression. His patch had already long been identified as the culprit and reverted. But over the course of three weeks he was insisting that it was not a kernel regression. Essentially he dug in for 22 days saying that it wasn't his problem. And he wasted tons of valuable contributor time where people were nicely telling him that, yes, it was indeed a regression.
Multiple people were telling him about the "don't break userspace" policy and how it was a regression. And yet that contributor was still deflecting responsibility for the problems caused. But the problem is that this patch would leave the distros in the lurch - scrambling to update their configuration before the kernel breaks behavior. And that's without any ETA on their "long term ... flexible solution" (http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/00380.html). Thousands of people with varying levels of technical competency would have had their systems break in unexpected ways.
Quite frankly, he earned the dressing down. And plenty of people tried to be nice to him about it. It just didn't take hold in his mind until Linus dropped in to rudely remind him that even "correct" behavior is a regression if it breaks userspace. Also note that Linus said the issue had been escalated to him. Someone explicitly brought this to his attention because there was a distinct lack of progress due to CYA responsibility deflection.