Linus responds to Hellwig - "the pull request you objected to DID NOT TOUCH THE DMA LAYER AT ALL... if you as a maintainer feel that you control who or what can use your code, YOU ARE WRONG."
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It literally wasn't about Rust specifically though. Christoph literally said it was about anything that was not C, including assembly, C++, brainfuck, or whatever, entering the kernel. Christoph likes Rust. Christoph (rightfully) does not like mixed language codebases for projects as large and important as Linux
Not his call, as we can see now
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Gee Linus you think you could've fucking said something before it got to this point?
What do you mean? He did step in, understood absolutely no context of the issue, told everyone to shut up, and then left without any real input. Fucking joke
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What does glazer mean in this context? (English is my fourth language)
"Glazing" is slang for over-complimenting, often to an obsessive degree
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25857381
Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA subsystem. Hellwig previously blocked rust bindings for DMA code, which in part resulted in Hector Martin from stepping down as a kernel maintainer and eventually Asahi Linux as a whole.
A lot of people commenting on this seem to have gaps in their knowledge of what happened. I highly recommend reading the linked email, as it is both short and has valuable context.
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So no, it's not several months; it's barely one month
How many months should he have waited for an authoritative response?
I don't agree with Hector's response either but that has nothing to do with the fact that Linus left them alone for months to sort out between themselves when he could have simply stepped in and ended it.
it turns out that the reaction was pretty clear not "no reaction". That's the reason this thread we're talking in exists.
This thread? The one that appeared weeks after he already quit? Not helpful.
How many months should he have waited for an authoritative response?
Well, Marcan should wait as long as feels right to him. As I said previously, I'm pretty sure he was already pissed off about previous R4L issues and he didn't quit because of this alone. I want to be clear that I'm commenting solely on the expectation of a swifter response from leadership in the original email thread and not on Marcan's decision to step down, which I can't be the judge of.
So, I expect people in places of power to take their time when they respond publicly to issues like this, for various reasons. Eg:
- they might try to resolve things in private first (seems to be the case)
- they might want to discuss with their peers to double check their decision making and to take collective action, this is especially true if the CoC committee gets involved
- they might want to chime in when people have calmed down and they expect to be able to have meaningful conversations with them
At the very least, I would have waited to see what happens with the patches if I were in his position. The review process, which kept going in the meantime, essentially sets a timer for a decision to be made. In the end, Hellwig's objections would either be acknowledged as blocking or they would be ignored. In any case there would have been a clear stance from the project's leadership. It makes sense to me to wait for this inevitable outcome before making a committal decision such as stepping down.
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A lot of people commenting on this seem to have gaps in their knowledge of what happened. I highly recommend reading the linked email, as it is both short and has valuable context.
Is there an easy way of seeing the preceding emails in a threaded format?
I read some posted yesterday that were related but it's damn confusing whether the conversation has been active in between?
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People really afraid of Rust out here.
I can relate. I can emphasize with someone who's learned every nuance of a language, and after 30-40 years suddenly these kids come in with their strange hieroglyphics slowly replacing everything you've worked on.
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Gee Linus you think you could've fucking said something before it got to this point?
Yah took him long enough and should have never got to this point. Now we have lost a contributer.
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What does glazer mean in this context? (English is my fourth language)
What does glazer mean in this context? (English is my fourth language)
English is my first language and I also wondered. The definition in the other reply to you was only added to wiktionary last year. According to know your meme, it became popular on TikTok in 2023 and allegedly originated on discord in November 2021.
(wiktionary also has another definition which I've also never heard of before which has been there since 2007 with no quotations of evidence of actual use...)
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What does glazer mean in this context? (English is my fourth language)
English is my first language and I also wondered. The definition in the other reply to you was only added to wiktionary last year. According to know your meme, it became popular on TikTok in 2023 and allegedly originated on discord in November 2021.
(wiktionary also has another definition which I've also never heard of before which has been there since 2007 with no quotations of evidence of actual use...)
A glazed donut is a pastry with a shiny coating of sugar covering it. The basic idea is that if you put someone's body-part in your mouth, for the purposes of this discussion, let's call it a "long finger", when it leaves your mouth, the wetness gives it a shiny look like it was glazed.
So to say you are glazing someone would mean you are such a fan of that person, you would be willing to make some parts of them really, really shiny with your mouth saliva.
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It literally wasn't about Rust specifically though. Christoph literally said it was about anything that was not C, including assembly, C++, brainfuck, or whatever, entering the kernel. Christoph likes Rust. Christoph (rightfully) does not like mixed language codebases for projects as large and important as Linux
Rust is straight up better than C. It's safer and less prone to errors.
It's not feasible to convert the entire Linux codebase at once. So your options are to either have a mixed codebase, or stick with effectively Cobol into 2020.
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A glazed donut is a pastry with a shiny coating of sugar covering it. The basic idea is that if you put someone's body-part in your mouth, for the purposes of this discussion, let's call it a "long finger", when it leaves your mouth, the wetness gives it a shiny look like it was glazed.
So to say you are glazing someone would mean you are such a fan of that person, you would be willing to make some parts of them really, really shiny with your mouth saliva.
Nobody needed a description that borders on erotica fiction.
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Linus ain't wrong tho
I really appreciated him saying 'I don't want yes men, I need people to call me on my bullshit, but I'm calling you out on yours'.
I read through the next few replies, and it seems like the anti-rust maintainer just has an axe to grind and can't stand people working in a language they don't understand.
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Is there an easy way of seeing the preceding emails in a threaded format?
I read some posted yesterday that were related but it's damn confusing whether the conversation has been active in between?
On the bottom of the page you have a tree representation of replies, with clickable links to each message. The layout might not work well on mobile with limited screen width though, but you can just click through them.
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Nobody needed a description that borders on erotica fiction.
Not the hero we needed, but the one I wanted.
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Nobody needed a description that borders on erotica fiction.
I did
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I do not know why you say it is easy to break.
The Rust team are maintaining their side. I do not expect it to break. And the C code that the Rust code depends on is used by lots of other code. It should be a stable interface. Changing the C code just to break the Rust code would break a lot of C code too and upset a lot of folks.
And the who point is to create a more idiomatic interface on the Rust side. So, even if the c interface does change, it may only be a small amount of Rust code that needs to change in response.
Yea and if the Rust developers don't show up to the show? Rust is a baby and it has done so little on its own. This isn't a neat little side project, this is code that a major vendor will want to take up and will demand be maintained. There are implications on a global scale.
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Rust is straight up better than C. It's safer and less prone to errors.
It's not feasible to convert the entire Linux codebase at once. So your options are to either have a mixed codebase, or stick with effectively Cobol into 2020.
Rust is great, but you are not thinking from a long-term project perspective. Rust is safer, but Linux needs to be maintainable or it dies.
Based on what you're saying, the only way its going to reasonably be converted to Rust is if someone forks Linux and matches all the changes in C as they happen but converts it all to Rust. Once its all converted and maintainability has been proven, a merge request would need to be made.
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(rightfully) does not like mixed language codebases for projects as large and important as Linux
You make it sound like it's a matter of taste rather than a technical one (and I suspect it actually might be just about taste in the end)
Its a little of column A, little of column B type situation.
Yes, some of it is his taste, but that taste is coming from a technical place. Primarily long term maintainability of the project.
I realize what Linus came out and said outlines that no code is entering Christoph's part of the project, but Christoph is playing goalie and needs to make sure that never happens in order to keep everything working correctly for a very long time.
Maybe the DMA module gets rewritten completely in Rust one day, but until then, rust modules interfacing with a C-only component seems to be the best for long-term maintenance.
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But isn’t this in specific just about bindings?
Yea but if someone uses those bindings then you can't just not support it.
By the time this code gets into a large scale production system it will be 2029. That is when the bugs will come in if someone leveraged the Rust bindings.
You can ask the big company users at that time to contribute their fixes upstream, but if they get resistance because they have relatively junior Rust devs trying to push up changes that only a handful of maintainers understand, the company will just stop upstreaming their changes.
The primary concern that a major open source project like this will have is that the major contributors will decide that interacting with it is more trouble than it is worth. That is how open source projects move to being passion projects and then die when the passion dies.
