Apparently "Joseph" deleted his comment (very un-git-like of GitHub to make deleting a comment without a trace so easy). I checked all the other participants above where "Joseph" posted and found a Dan, but no Joseph.

Reddit[1] found the "Joseph" in question, his comments are still visible in his public activity stream: https://github.com/pirtlj

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/tionj/linus_tor...

Thanks, good find!

So, if @pirtlj said that in response to Linus's first comment, then he was way out of line, and something should have been said. Maybe Linus didn't say the exact right thing, but I doubt I would have been able to say much better. Hopefully @pirtlj learned more than that he shouldn't have said anything (although even that would be a good thing, I think)

Joseph said something snarky along the lines of "Oh I'm Linus Torvalds, I'm always right" -- I think Linus was overreacting, but he was at least a little justified. He seems to get very angry when people state anything more than what's based on "facts."

The idea that one text wrapping approach is objectively superior for all purposes is incoherent. By that I mean it is an impossible claim given our most accurate understanding of epistemology.

Did he say it was for 'all purposes'? He said 50 characters for the first line is ideal for shortlogs, and 72 characters for more verbose logs, etc, when viewed in a terminal. He also said that encoding word wrap at write-time is better because only the author knows how to appropriately wrap. As he said, sometimes lines go longer, if the commit message includes program output that shouldn't be altered. So, you can't relegate word wrapping to the presentation layer without an unreasonably smart algorithm.

I interpret his statements to mean that the git/kernel projects' commit message standards are objectively better on all the ways we know how to measure (or at least, for all of the most common ways of looking at commit messages). So again, if you want to disagree, your choices are to point out a criterion that is not being considered, or how this system is not better at a known criterion.