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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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.
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But isn’t this in specific just about bindings?
It appears so now, yes, but when the drama initially came out it sounded like they were asking for a tiny amount of rust in the kernel to make it work, or if not rust, changing the C to tailor it specifically to the rust. Which I think is a reasonable thing to be concerned about from a maintainability perspective long-term, especially if the rust developers decide to leave randomly (Hector's abrupt quitting over this very issue is a prime example).
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Yes but that clearly was not happening. And now they lost a contributor for no reason.
I'd venture to guess this isn't the first time Linus has had to deal with devs who have ideological disagreements and one quits. It's not also his job to keep that from happening. What he said is true, there's a process they have for maintaining Linux, and it doesn't involve flame wars on social media.....it involves flame wars over email
.But seriously, if a devs are going to get upset at each other and rage quit, it's not Linus' job to play mediator.
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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.
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.
One was a direct result of the other. You can't separate them.
they might try to resolve things in private first (seems to be the case)
Neither of them have the authority to resolve it in private and it was clear by the third message that there would be no resolution between them.
they might want to chime in when people have calmed down
They didn't calm down, it was plain to see that things were only becoming more and more heated until the conversation reached a breaking point.
Marcan asked Linus to come in and make an authoritative statement and end the bickering and he did not. Hector interpreted that as Linus being apathetic (which is a rational position given the time that had passed). I'm not going to try and judge Linus, I don't know what was going on in his life at the time, but it was, as Hector stated, a failure of leadership regardless.
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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.
Except that's literally the reality with computers. Everything evolves and things go obsolete. I'm sure the COBOL and Fortran programmers were pissed when the kids started using C too.
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God damn if these Rust glazers are so offended by this, just go work on Redox
You mean the operating system with a cuckold license? Nothx
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I'd venture to guess this isn't the first time Linus has had to deal with devs who have ideological disagreements and one quits. It's not also his job to keep that from happening. What he said is true, there's a process they have for maintaining Linux, and it doesn't involve flame wars on social media.....it involves flame wars over email
.But seriously, if a devs are going to get upset at each other and rage quit, it's not Linus' job to play mediator.
it used to be hard to imagining anyone wanting to work w someone as toxic as linus; but i've learned after my first 2 tenures at faang that developers are no different than kardashian worshippers.
devs getting angry at each other and then rage quiting is just a sympton of a tribalistically shared belief of intellectual superiority among developers like when kardashian sisters have beef with each other and their followers attack each other for it.
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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.
Are we hating on Linus here or agreeing with him? I'm so out of the loop.
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What does glazer mean in this context? (English is my fourth language)
(slang) Someone who glazes (to compliment or praise someone excessively in a cringeworthy way); an asskisser or sycophant.
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Are we hating on Linus here or agreeing with him? I'm so out of the loop.
Agreeing
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New people don't realize that Linux is really a soap opera with a small software project attached.
That's not to say any other OS effort is not also a soap opera. I bet Microsoft has its fair share of drama, too; it's just that no one sees it because the development effort is proprietary.
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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.
That is not how it will happen, if it ever fully converts at all.
Rust will first be added in a way that allows it to run on top of existing C code. That is what we are seeing here with Rust being used to write drivers.
As sub-systems get overhauled and replaced, sometimes Rust will be chosen as the language to do that. In these cases, a sub-system or module will be written in Rust and both C code and Rust code will use it (call into it).
The above is how the Linux kernel may migrate to Rust (or mostly Rust) over time.
As devs get more comfortable, there may be some areas of the kernel that mix C and Rust. This is likely to be less common and is probably the most difficult to maintain.
Nobody wants to rewrite working, solid kernel modules in Rust though. So, it seems very likely that the kernel will remain mostly C for a long, long time. There are no doubt a few areas though where Rust will really shine
No need for a fork or a rewrite.
