Torvalds plays part on 'Talk Like a Pirate Day'

Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Thursday signalled his enjoyment of the annual "Talk Like a Pirate Day" festivities, using the nautical lexicon to launch an update to the kernel at the heart of the open source operating system.

"Ahoy! She's good to go, hoist anchor!" wrote Torvalds in a public announcement on Wednesday of version 2.6.18 of the Linux kernel. "Here's some real booty for all you landlubbers," he continued.

"There's not too many changes, with t'bulk of the patch bein' defconfig updates, but the shortlog at the aft of this here email describes the details if you care, you scurvy dogs," he wrote.

Signing his missive "Linus 'but you can call me Cap'n'", Torvalds went on to assign watery nicknames to a number of well-known kernel developers, as follows:

• Al "bilge rat" Viro
• "Cap'n" Andrew Morton
• Paul "peg leg" Mackerras

He also sprinkled pirate vernacular throughout the email, detailing the kernel update, for example:

• [MTD] NAND: keelhaul marooned URL in Kconfig
• e1000: fix bilge-sucking TX timout hang regression for 82542rev3
• [ARM] 3793/1: S3C2412: fix barnacles in wrong serial info struct
• [Shiver me timbers] EXT2: Remove superblock lock contention in ext2_statfs
• Davy Jones: Didn't do anything, the scurvy lad. Ahoy!
• Well blow me down, if he didn't fix 'make headers_check' on ia64
• [JFFS2][SUMMARY] Fix a bilge-suckin' summary collectin' bug. Arrr!
• genirq: Fix the typo in IRQ resend smartly, cabin boy!

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is on 19 September. The event encourages people worldwide to use pirate terms in their everyday speech.