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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

#691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does not need to consider those ramifications because it is up to the rust for Linux people to fix the issues. He does not need to care about them at all. They reiterated that in the thread too.

This works only if you trust the Rust people to do their job. Obviously the maintainer does not trust the Rust people, but they also did nothing to gain his trust, but the opposite. Just saying "Trust me, or else I will shame you" is not a viable strategy. The default position of any code maintainer who sees some people coming and saying that they would maintain from now on some parts of the code and that there shoul…

No it does not require trust. If the RfL people don't do their job, well then Linux releases with the Rust parts marked broken and that's that.

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

#692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the response from Dr Greg to Linus, https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250207121638.GA7356... adds some interesting insights. There seems to be some issue with unaccountable maintainers, and that’s a problem for innovation. If you can’t even get to the point of “technical debate” (we aren’t interested, sorry), then what hope innovation? These are “people problems”, and there are no easy or good answers,…

Looks like Dr Greg (not Greg KH) is just piling his own personal grievance on top of the drama. Saying "Jim are you listening?" makes me wonder who he's sniping at. Speaking as an actual People Manager, his ideas sound pretty shallow.

I'm not a "People Manager" -- what is shallow about the ideas?

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

#693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought is what's telling is the 'rewrite it in rust'. Rust doesn't have a new business case. C was better than assembly. C++ was better than C for GUI applications. JAVA has garbage collection and usually won't force you to fix your machine after a bad crash. Python is better than Perl for quick and dirty stuff. PHP lets you build a web service without much pain. C# is a better Java that also gives you better int…

I guess you make a living writing zero day exploits?

Keep believing that Rust magically prevents you from getting owned when you fuck up.

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

#695
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…

thank Linus for you

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

#696
post #600
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've contributed to a couple of projects that use email based workflows. I can customize my environment, but it takes a lot of time, and I would rather do something else than figure out how to filter the firehose of a mailing list to the few emails I actually care about, or learn how to use a new email client that is slightly better and handling patches. The first few times, it took me longer to figure out how to sen…

But you only have to figure that out once. Amortized over many contributions the cost is essentially nothing.

We only have so many hours in our sadly finite lives.

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

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I never submitted a patch personally, I had once conferred with some of the input devs to add a trackpad to the synaptics driver... they were queueing up an update to add other trackpads, and they said they would add mine... 5 years later, it's still not there. It was just a one-liner, and I'm not really sure why it never got added... On the other hand, I once ran into an issue with uboot where a bad update kno…

> 5 years later, it's still not there. It was just a one-liner, and I'm not really sure why it never got added. I think they expect people who want things to advocate harder than just mentioning it once. If no one brings it up again, then they assume that no one cares.

Quite the opposite. If you “pester” for something, they’ll explicitly reject it.

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

#698
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, that he let's a maintainer say he is going to fight any Rust code getting into any "core" (whatever he considers core) part of the kernel, even if it's just a wrapper to make driver code more maintainable. I would say, that's a strategy decision that should not be up to any subsystem maintainer, that's a decision that should be up to Linus, by not intervening he essentially endorses that getting rust…

> by not intervening he essentially endorses that getting rust into the kernel requires consensus from all subsystem maintainers And let's not be obtuse, some of those subsystem maintainers are staunchly opposed, so "it's up to them" is obviously an indirect way of saying "no rust". I don't blame those maintainers for balking at a whole new very different language, but Torvalds has a choice of telling them either "su…

This seems like black and white thinking. There's a huge spectrum between

> "suck it up, buttercup" or "I hear you; rust is gone".

where various levels of compromise happens.

Maintainers are people and people can change their mind over time. If rust was a huge success in large parts of the kernel and you still had a few holdouts, sure, you could tell them to adapt or go away. In this early stage, it's kinda up to rust people to show that both they and rust can work in this setting

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

#699
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…

Last year, Linus approached the topic of Rust in the kernel as if it were two opposite communities that were each passionate about their cause: https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/19/torvalds_talks_rust_i... And his viewpoint at the time seemed fairly agnostic - he enjoyed the passion on both sides but said nothing about what his thoughts were. This leads me to believe that he hasn't spent the time to think about the…

If you're gonna lead a group of people effectively, you kinda have to listen to them. leading by decree works occasionally, but you can't afford to do it often.

If there's a lot of people sceptical to rust, doing a limited experiment is one way to figure out if it's going to work. Rust people working in the kernel should act accordingly. Drama like this is not helpful

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

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does not need to consider those ramifications because it is up to the rust for Linux people to fix the issues. He does not need to care about them at all. They reiterated that in the thread too.

This works only if you trust the Rust people to do their job. Obviously the maintainer does not trust the Rust people, but they also did nothing to gain his trust, but the opposite. Just saying "Trust me, or else I will shame you" is not a viable strategy. The default position of any code maintainer who sees some people coming and saying that they would maintain from now on some parts of the code and that there shoul…

Saying "I do not trust you, so I'm going to stonewall your entire work with which you could have built that trust" is not viable either.

Besides, none of this was said. Hellwig did not say "I do not trust you enough". He said "you are cancer, go away". First is harsh, but at least somewhat reasonable (in the sense that it _can be reasoned with_); second is not reasonable at all. Your interpretation is excessively charitable to an obvious bad-faith actor.

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