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Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

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Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#201

Post by artyom »

gary_0 wrote: post #27

The Rust drama is an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds. Instead of decisively saying "no, never" or "yes, make it so," he has consistently equivocated on the Rust issue. Given the crisis of confidence among a sizeable (and very vocal) contingent of the Linux community, that decision has backfired horribly. And it's quite out of character for Linus not to have a blazingly clear opinion. (We all know his stan…

> an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds

Exactly the point. IMHO the one and only thing that made Linux successful as a project is Linus' strong leadership - which has been criticized ad-nauseam over the years; yet it's the only thing that yields results.

So in the specific instances (like this one) where he's not decisively, unequivocally, and even harshly saying "yes" or "no" to something, the community shows a very clear incapability of reaching a decision.

Reminds me of a similar scenario that happened years ago with GVR stepping down as BDFL for Python - just after a tiresome and wasteful fight with the community's opinions.

"Community" is just a very naive ideal for me. There's a finite number of people that can do the job, and even a more finite number of people that can make a decision and stand by it.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#202

Post by parl_match »

999900000999 wrote: post #193

Have to side with the one language argument here. It's hard enough to get a single programming language to work right. C is old and stable. Rust is new and mostly stable, mostly stable isn't going to cut it when billions upon billions of devices depend on your work. At the same time this type of ego driven drama keeps me out of the open source community. I have enough people telling me how to code during my 9-5. I op…

I don't agree with this anymore tbh. But for a project as large, mature, and widely worked on as the Linux Kernel, I absolutely agree.

I think it's a noble goal worth working towards, but Marcan's smug as hell "ill merge and y'all will fix all your broken shit" attitude predictably backfired

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#203

Post by d3Xt3r »

PedroBatista wrote: post #94
threatofrain wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps C is here to stay and that is the way Linux should live and naturally die. That's what's being proposed here by the guy who opposes multi-language projects.

That's my overall point of view too. Regardless of infinite technical discussions about one or another, if Alice and Bob can't live together than just don't get married. Why spend all this energy on conflict and drama to no end? If one language/technology/group is so much better then just fork the thing and follow their own path. I'm actually not defending the C guys, I just want to leave them alone and let "Nature"…

I concur. Personally, I'd love to see all the Linux Rust effort being redirected at Redox OS.

If the Asahi team focused their efforts on Redox, with all the genius talent they they have, we could see an actually practical, usable implementation of Redox on real hardware; a potential daily-driver which would catapult the development of whole ecosystem - and that can only be a good thing.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#204

Post by arp242 »

serial_dev wrote: post #155
tptacek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes, re that fedi thread.

This one bit looks exactly right, though: > As for how to move forward, (...) Either Linus takes the pull, and whatever Christoph says is irrelevant, or he doesn't, and R4L dies. Everything else is a waste of everyone's time and energy. It does look like maintainers should have a "disagree and commit" mentality at some point, whatever decision they end up making. I thought Rust in Linux was evaluated, discussed and a…

"R4L dies" is hyperbolic nonsense. There are many ways/places to integrate Rust in the kernel, even for wrappers. It's not like "I think this code should be someone else" automatically means the death of Rust.

Marcan goes full nuclear every other time someone disagrees with him. He's very much the "if it's not my preferred way then we might as well not do it at all"-type of engineer (many of us have worked with those people).

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#205

Post by somanyphotons »

naasking wrote: post #26
bjord wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this just weird religious adherence to the belief that a multi-language codebase will be harder to maintain? what's the rationale, exactly?

Maintainers come and go, languages come and go. C will never go away and everyone working on kernels knows C, so there's a certain labour pool and skillset that will always be available that doesn't necessarily apply to Rust. That's even setting aside any technical issues, like bugs creeping up in the language interoperability layer, which obviously doesn't really happen if you're only using one compiler.

The linux kernel project specifically cares about the labor pool of maintainers.

My assumption is that it's easier to train someone on rust then to train someone to be a kernel subsystem maintainer

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#206

Post by mort96 »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #145
dralley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who called him out for that made some testy social media comments of her own this morning. Personally, seeing > Being toxic on the right side of an argument is still toxic, [...] written unironically, on social media, immediately after that person wrote @marcan > and if that then causes you to ragequit, because you can't actually deal with the heat you've been dishing out coming back around the corner: fuc…

> Maybe don't make comments like that on social media if you want to criticize people for leaning on social media in kernel disputes. This seems like a tu quoque fallacy. The feedback is either applicable or not, regardless of who said it. They're absolutely correct that Being toxic on the right side of an argument is still toxic . Even if there is hypocrisy (whether judged by you personally or someone else), it woul…

I disagree. The behavior of the person who complains about decorum is relevant because it may indicate a double standard in the community. If a community (such as the Linux kernel maintainer community) is ganging up on an outsider using arguments of decorum, it's highly relevant that the already-accepted members of that community themselves act in a way which would've been deemed unacceptable if they were outsiders.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#207

Post by lII1lIlI11ll »

gary_0 wrote: post #27

The Rust drama is an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds. Instead of decisively saying "no, never" or "yes, make it so," he has consistently equivocated on the Rust issue. Given the crisis of confidence among a sizeable (and very vocal) contingent of the Linux community, that decision has backfired horribly. And it's quite out of character for Linus not to have a blazingly clear opinion. (We all know his stan…

> The Rust drama is an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds. Instead of decisively saying "no, never" or "yes, make it so," he has consistently equivocated on the Rust issue. Given the crisis of confidence among a sizeable (and very vocal) contingent of the Linux community, that decision has backfired horribly.

Efficiently collaborating on large distributed open source projects like Linux is as much social activity as technical. For people like Kent Overstreet or marcan and many before them this is apparently a hard thing to grasp and they have been failing badly at following the process, building consensus, earning respect and trust of people from other subsystems, that kind of things. To me it looks like that for Linux big part of R4L experiment is to specifically understand whether Rust people can convince key stakeholders that R4L is good idea and get their buy-in and that is why he doesn't attempt to force it. Also, what is he gonna do to the reluctant but key maintainers? Refuse to accept anything from them until each of them shows him a repo with all Rustlings exercises solved to ensure they are ready for Rust or what?

> And it's quite out of character for Linus not to have a blazingly clear opinion.

Linus tends to have clear opinions on things he is world class in. He is technically brilliant and very knowledgeable in most of the low level systems things but likely not in Rust, so it is understandable for him to just keep being open minded about it and let the chips fall where they may.

> As a pilot program, R4L should have graduated or ended a long time ago. After several years of active development, its status remains unclear.

Which is absolutely normal for the kernel. You can have a driver spending years in staging or RTLinux taking 20 years to get there. It is totally expected for such a disruptive change as introducing new (and quite complicated) programming language to take a few more years to reach maturity.

> Arguably his reprimand of Martin is a clear signal that he will never show Rust any favor, but he hasn't said anything explicitly.

Not it isn't.

> decision has backfired horribly

> place responsibility for the drama on Martin's shoulders

> Imagine how much time and energy (even just Martin's alone) could have been saved if Linus had just said "no, keep it downstream".

HN crowd and random JavaScript-kids on Reddit are only hotly debating this because the "drama" has the word "Rust" in the title. For Linux maintainers it is just another day at the office, nothing much to see here honestly.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#208

Post by randmeerkat »

flohofwoe wrote: post #123
randmeerkat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out FOSS devs are humas just like everybody else and suffer from the same flaws. It is rather anticlimactic. I had always imagined FOSS to be this free exchange of ideas, thoughtful consideration, and intentional action. Seeing what it has become though… Maybe closed source is better.

> Seeing what it has become though... Was it ever different? Not as far as I can remember at least. I think one of the main strengths of open source development is that it works despite the drama. With open source projects, everybody is free to start their own fork over disagreements, and if the fork actually turns out to be objectively better it will replace the original project. > Maybe closed source is better. It'…

> It's the same and worse over there, the drama just isn't public.

At least you’re getting paid. What’s the point of spending one’s free time arguing with strangers on the internet over some code that will be refactored anyway ten years from now..? Life is short, have fun, enjoy it. If you’re spending time or money on something that sucks, walk away.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#209

Post by mort96 »

Longhanks wrote: post #137
pyrale wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The kernel developers are the ones doing the actual work, which legitimates their opinion of doing things. Both sides of the argument are kernel developers here, though.

Well, one side just quit. And that particular side was told by Linus Torvalds himself that his way of Social Media brigading is inappropriate for kernel development, and that the current process works. I choose to believe Linus. His work on and guidance of the kernel used to and still does work pretty great.

No, the entirety of the Rust for Linux kernel development community didn't just quit. One guy quit. There are plenty of other kernel developers who are trying to push Rust 4 Linux forwards and make it viable for more kinds of drivers.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#210

Post by [deleted] »

999900000999 wrote: post #193

Have to side with the one language argument here. It's hard enough to get a single programming language to work right. C is old and stable. Rust is new and mostly stable, mostly stable isn't going to cut it when billions upon billions of devices depend on your work. At the same time this type of ego driven drama keeps me out of the open source community. I have enough people telling me how to code during my 9-5. I op…

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