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.
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.
He understands Rust and claims to like it. He simply disagrees with the decision to have a mixed language kernel and is trying to unilaterally stop it from happening.
He is totally correct and it is great to see him finally step in to settle this drama. Hopefully it will reduce the level of noise going forward.
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?
A lot of people commenting on this seem to have gaps in their knowledge of what happened
We’re in a Linus-email-🍿-thread, so that kind of goes without saying doesn’t it? 😂
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.
We’ve lost two this week
Internal politics is a bitch 😩
Sometimes you gotta let people try to resolve things on their own first.
Yes but that clearly was not happening. And now they lost a contributor for no reason.
Marcan was probably fed up and was looking for a reason leave. If that’s not the case, then it’s silly for him to just quit mid-discussion, before it’s even become apparent what the reaction to Cristoph Hellwig’s behavior would be and whether his reply would even be taken into account during the review process.
before it’s even become apparent what the reaction to Cristoph Hellwig’s behavior would be
It was very clear that the reaction was going to be no reaction. That’s the point. Several months later is not “mid-discussion”.
Cristoph Hellwig’s initial message was on 2025-01-08. Marcan’s stepping down was on 2025-02-07. So no, it’s not several months; it’s barely one month. Getting in fights in mailing lists and making social media posts is not everyone’s first reaction and it is arguably not the best reaction, especially for people in places of power. It is silly for Marcan to demand everybody’s reaction to be as loud and as quick as his own.
It was very clear that the reaction was going to be no reaction.
Well, it turns out that the reaction was pretty clear not “no reaction”. That’s the reason this thread we’re talking in exists. Marcan was objectively wrong if he assumed Hellwig’s comments and nack would be accepted. Instead, Hellwig was explicitly called out for having no say on the matter and for producing “garbage arguments”.
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.
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 as tribalistic as any kardashian worshipper.
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.
People really afraid of Rust out here.
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
(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)
Not his call, as we can see now
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.
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 they’re making 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.
I can’t fathom how do you mean Rust is not maintainable. If anything for a new programmer C code is much more mind boggling than Rust.
Writing in Rust might make it much more maintainable.
See this is the problem with Rust people, they always misconstrue you saying “mixing two languages together makes a project less maintainable” to mean “Rust is unmaintainable” if Rust is the second language.
This is why the disagreement between Hector and Christoph happened in the first place.
Do better, reddit_sux
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.
Anyone got more context on this I can read through? I haven’t kept up with this other than Linus’s notorious attitude.
Someone submitted some code to the Linux kernel. One of the maintainers repeatedly denied it for no reason other than it contained code that is not C. A different contributor became very angry, lashed out publicly on social media, accused the maintainer of sabotaging R4L for no technical reason, then removed themselves from the project. They were also the founder of Asahi Linux and resigned from that as well.
It’s nothing to do with Rust, specifically.
Marcan is not the submitter. Unless I’ve missed something, the submitter is still working on the patch.
Yes you’re correct. I’ll update that.
Yeah that is a very opinionated description. Up until “the submitter became very angry, lashed out” that sounds about right, but from there on, your bias shows. Which is fine, and human, but probably worth mentioning this to others reading this. It’s not exactly an objective view, whatever that’s worth.
The part where I exclusively stated facts is opinionated?
It’s mostly in that linked thread. The high level of it is a guy wanted to push Rust code. The maintainer said no it would mean the API for this would be tied to Rust and that is unacceptable. It cause another big contributer to throw a fit and Linus said he can’t be everyone’s mom. They kept fighting for like 2 months apparently? Now Linus stepped in, looked at the code and said the Rust code clearly doesn’t impact the API in the way the maintainer was saying it just breaks itself if the maintainers allow changes to the API.
I kinda dislike the idea that it’s cool for people to contribute code that is so easy to break. I have a feeling after it happens a few times they are going to claim that it is being done intentionally and that the slap fights will carry on.
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.
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
I’m personally not a fan of permissible licenses, but you don’t need to bring your fetishes up in every conversation.
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 or other 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.
Nobody needed a description that borders on erotica fiction.
Are we hating on Linus here or agreeing with him? I’m so out of the loop.
He has very solidly worded points and correct analysis of the problem. 100% agree with what was written by Linus.
