These fights between "specs lawyers" and "pragmatic" programmers are painfully frequent. Reminds me of the ext4 controversy on the out-of-order metadata synchronization.
> Torvalds has his own take on this, which is that "For some reason, compiler developers seem to be far enough removed from 'real life' that they have a tendency to talk in terms of 'this is what the spec says' rather than 'this is a problem'."
Agreed. We have to produce a lot of paper doc in my domain, and in our bug base, there's a section dedicated to spec bugs. Just cos it's in the spec doesn't make it right.
And the spec may be right, but it's still the wrong thing to do.
Applications are complex, fragile things. If you care about keeping them going over time, you wind up kowtowing to a lot of workarounds. Welcome to the software industry.
The attitude of "I can change library Z, be spec compliant and still sleep at night even though the change took half an industry down" might be /correct/ but it is not going to retain customers. Do it enough, and you'll see users flee.
Linus himself has already expressed his point of view many times, for example here (http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw...):
> Torvalds has his own take on this, which is that "For some reason, compiler developers seem to be far enough removed from 'real life' that they have a tendency to talk in terms of 'this is what the spec says' rather than 'this is a problem'."
I couldn't agree more.