Via Slashdot (whoa, that's the first one of those in a while), here's a really great interview with Linus Torvalds.
Some good bits:
So I am actually not a big fanatic about having tools that figure out your problems for you. Because if you need tools for that, you design something wrong in the first place.
I don't like tooks as maintenance help. I like typechecking as a way of showing you where you make mistakes. But it's for stupid errors. It's not for really hard problems. As to how to solve the complexity problem, so far the real solution has been good taste.
(Chuckles from audience.)
Really.
I mean a lot of patches end up getting rejected because they're ugly. And a lot of patches end up getting accepted because they clean up certain things. Like, if you looked at how the architecture handling has changed during 2.5, it is so much cleaner these days.
A PC is a PC, right? That's how the kernel used to think about it. Except now a PC can be a regular PC or a numma machine. Or one of the SGI strange wonder machines. Or Voyagers, whatever they're called. Or any of these subarchitectures within PCs. And they got separated out with the common code left in common files and cleaned up a lot. And that was just because the maintainers were having nightmares with ifdevs, and saying "I can't manage this any more, so we need to clean it up." And people did. Good taste. Ifdevs are bad. Fix them. Not, "Okay, let's have tools that verify that we use them correctly." See? That's the difference.
About Linux killer apps, or something:
Linus: I think the biggest single thing that has happened on the (garbled) have been a lot of good library frameworks. Qt in particular I think made a huge difference. And he KDE libraries and toolbuilder things... (garbled) infrastructure. Gnome is getting there too. But for some reason I just noticed that the KDE people consider it more important to have it working, and sane. Instead of trying to aim for perfection, which the Gnome people are trying to do.
Also make sure to check out the bits about quantum and DNA computing, and the part about how he was actually bitten by a penguin. 
Ok, I'll quote a bit more:
Linux and SMPs
Q: How do you feel about large and small Linux. Is there going to be an SMP sixteen [CPU] version?
Linus: I used to think that it made no sense to try to support huge machines in the same source tree as regular machines. I used to think that big iron issues are so different from regular hardware that it's better to have a fork and have some special code for machines with 256 CPUs or something like that. The thing is, the SMP scalability has helped even the UPKs just by cleaning stuff up and having to be a lot more careful about how you do things. And we've been able to keep all the overheads down.
So that spinlocks, which are there in the source, just go away because you don't need them. We're scaling so well right now that I don't see any reason to separate out the high end hardware. A lot of the reason for using Linux in the first place ends up being that you want to ride the wave of having millions of machines out there that actually incorporate new technology faster than most of the big iron things usually do. So the big iron people want to be in the same tree, because having a separate big tree would mean that it wouldn't get the testing, it wouldn't get the features, it wouldn't get all the stuff that Linux has got, and that traditional Unix usually doesn't have.
And this part I found fascinating, as part of his response when asked about the status of the 2.6 kernel:
We don't have a lot of outstanding issues. We have a few. And the problem is, right now... I said no to a clean-up patch today, which started adding warnings for stuff that you really shouldn't do. But this is not the time to even add warnings about stuff you really shouldn't do. Because that kind of patch will result in people looking at the warnings and trying to clean up code. And yes, it will clean up code; but it will also break stuff by mistake. Which actually happened with this patch already. So at this point we're just into a situation where it's hard to convince people not to do clean-ups.
A lot of people want to polish it for 2.6. And the thing is, we don't want it polished. We want it solid as a rock. And it is okay to be scruffy-looking like a rock too. But it has to be solid.
Monday, November 3, 2003
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Looks like a good interview, one I had not seen, and will have to read more fully very soon.