Dunno, whenever I dig into one of the "shitshows" I find I mostly agree with it. I'd say a decent fraction of the ones that make hacker news are some form of "Don't break userspace". He obviously feels it's quite important, and there's been several cases of failed perception (like the gnome folks breaking userspace "like linux does").
Sometimes it's worth being a bit over the top so that the entire community you are working with gets the message loud and clear. Seems like other communities (like bsd, gnome, debian, etc), often have extensive documentation, policies, and best practices... which are often ignored because every developer doesn't keep 100% of the best practices in mind at all times.
I suspect a big part of why user space is broken so rarely in Linux is exactly because Linus has made such a big deal about it in the past.
Sometimes it's worth being a bit over the top so that the entire community you are working with gets the message loud and clear. Seems like other communities (like bsd, gnome, debian, etc), often have extensive documentation, policies, and best practices... which are often ignored because every developer doesn't keep 100% of the best practices in mind at all times.
I suspect a big part of why user space is broken so rarely in Linux is exactly because Linus has made such a big deal about it in the past.