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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

#861

Post by rincebrain »

robertlagrant wrote: post #748
lll-o-lll wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The short of his rant… This does not read as a rant at all to me. Rather it seeks to highlight a problem using an example from his own work and proposes a possible solution (with a previous caveat of “I don’t know how to fix this”). > "Code Of Standards for maintainers" in addition to a CoC He wants maintainers to behave in some pre-determined understandable fashion. He wants some accountability, and that seems rea…

> This is not a “maintainers must do what I want”, this is “let’s set basic expectations” and ensure people follow them. Whatever those should be. But presumably it's not whatever they should be. It's what he wants them to be. And what should happen if they're not followed?

His complaint is, in essence, that people will block technical proposals for nontechnical reasons, and that attempts to resolve this result in people complaining that you're talking about nontechnical things at all.

Few people like dealing with interpersonal conflict. They want to think that technical meritocracy wins the arguments.

But in that discussion, a maintainer said "I am going to try to sabotage this because I hate it.", and there's no technical argument to resolve that. And there's not really any route other than escalation to some kind of authority if there's not a common negotiation baseline.

"You can't reason someone out of a position they weren't reasoned into."

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

#862

Post by uecker »

_ph_ wrote: post #856
uecker wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the "removing one category of errors" is not true when you use unsafe blocks in Rust, which is done generously in system programming.

Is that so? How large parts of the Rust kernel drivers in existence are inside unsafe blocks? Yes, unsafe, as the name says, allows unsafe parts. But it is trivial to audit code for the usage of unsafe. Which means, everything else isn't. And it is there where the most common mistakes are made.

Is it trivial to audit? Here is a critical overflow in a matrix transpose: https://vulert.com/vuln-db/crates-io-transpose-125781

This is exactly the mistakes we also have in C and Rust people would do a little dance and take such bugs as argument why C is really dangerous and needs to be avoided. But rather obviously, mistakes can also happen in Rust and Rust does not "eliminate a class of errors" except when completely avoiding unsafe blocks. Maybe Rust is still more memory safe than C, I actually also believe this, but it is nowhere as safe as people like to claim and whether this is worth all the complexity is entirely unclear.

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

#863

Post by steveklabnik »

rc00 wrote: post #859
steveklabnik wrote: post #841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greg replied and explained that this is a mischaracterization https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/2025013030-gummy-cosm...

You are misrepresenting the current state. The thread was unfortunately diverted before Jason's question received an appropriate response and conclusion: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250131135421.GO5556... > Then I think we need a clear statement from Linus how he will be working. If he is build testing rust or not. > Without that I don't think the Rust team should be saying "any changes on the C side res…

Let's say that we both agree that Linus should be making clear statements here, and that lack of clarity is causing lots of problems.

That one bug happened one time does not mean that the promise is broken. To be clear, it's a bad thing, but acting like this means the entire working rules are a lie is overreacting.

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

#864

Post by winocm »

Locutus_ wrote: post #810
starspangled wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah m68k is still around too and it has more than a decade on alpha. People use and maintain them and they have very little impact outside arch/ nowadays so they're on the happy side of cost/benefit I guess.

M68k has the advantage that it has a fairly typical memory model. Alpha's memory model has problems with providing atomic access to single bytes, which i'd imagine in a kernel is a bit annoying :-) And then there's just the social aspect, m68k was used in the Amiga/Atari/Mac/QL/x68k, so there is a whole generation of us m68k fans who are willing to keep it alive. Alpha has it's fans (me included!), but it's not exact…

Ah, my favorite instructions, 'hw_ldl/l', 'hw_stl/c', 'ldl_l', 'stl_c' and their quadword siblings.

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

#865

Post by neobrain »

eqvinox wrote: post #838
neobrain wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't say anything about moderator action for me. He closed the account himself: > I actually wasn't sure if I wanted to delete my Mastodon entirely or not, but as I intended to fill in my password for confirmation and decide whether to click the button, my password manager auto-submitted the form for me. Call it fate, I guess. I mostly don't regret it. Maybe I'll be back some day, maybe not. https://old.reddit.…

This is what I got when I posted my comment: https://imgur.com/a/zlNmWtF (TZ is UTC+1) It is gone now and gives a generic "nothing here"; I have no idea whether the "suspended by moderator" display was some kind of bug, transient state, or whether he's just lying, or both things are true and he just deleted his account after it was suspended. (Well, his Reddit post doesn't claim his Mastodon account didn't get suspen…

> whether he's just lying, or both things are true and he just deleted his account after it was suspended

This is obviously just a Mastodon bug (backend treats suspension and deletion as the same thing, for example). I'm not sure why one would entertain the idea of marcan making up a lie about being suspended from an instance he's an admin of.

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

#866

Post by steveklabnik »

eqvinox wrote: post #848
eqvinox wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I got when I posted my comment: https://imgur.com/a/zlNmWtF (TZ is UTC+1) It is gone now and gives a generic "nothing here"; I have no idea whether the "suspended by moderator" display was some kind of bug, transient state, or whether he's just lying, or both things are true and he just deleted his account after it was suspended. (Well, his Reddit post doesn't claim his Mastodon account didn't get suspen…

Actually… I'm really not a fan of how Mastodon handles account deletion. I've interacted with him there about a week ago, and all of his posts are now missing from those threads. I guess it makes sense from a "be able to change your ways and not be stuck with ancient bad things you did" perspective, and there's a right to deletion/"be forgotten" in some legal frameworks, but this hinders necessary community processes…

When you delete something, your instance sends Delete events to other instances. Well behaved instances respect this request, but you could have an instance that does not.

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

#867

Post by rc00 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #863
rc00 wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misrepresenting the current state. The thread was unfortunately diverted before Jason's question received an appropriate response and conclusion: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250131135421.GO5556... > Then I think we need a clear statement from Linus how he will be working. If he is build testing rust or not. > Without that I don't think the Rust team should be saying "any changes on the C side res…

Let's say that we both agree that Linus should be making clear statements here, and that lack of clarity is causing lots of problems. That one bug happened one time does not mean that the promise is broken. To be clear, it's a bad thing, but acting like this means the entire working rules are a lie is overreacting.

> That one bug happened one time does not mean that the promise is broken.

It's not been once. Don't you understand that is why things have gotten to this point? Are you aware of how the developers have been using Coccinelle in their workflows and how many subsystems support it? And are you aware that the Coccinelle for Rust implementation is constantly in a dire state? Have some empathy for the folks who have had their workflows broken and burdens increased because of it.

> Let's say that we both agree that Linus should be making clear statements here, and that lack of clarity is causing lots of problems.

Clarity will be communicated by the result of this patch set.

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

#868

Post by throwaway2037 »

hinkley wrote: post #620
throwaway2037 wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask something controversial? What if Rust never becomes a significant part of the Linux kernel? What if they keep stalling and all the people pushing for it give up? There seems to be this faith on HN that Rust absolutely belongs in the Linux kernel and if not, the project is a failure.

If you wait long enough a Rust competitor will gain traction. And honestly I wonder if that might not be for the best. How many of rust’s features have only been tried a couple of times?

    > If you wait long enough a Rust competitor will gain traction.
Are you implying that a fork of the Linux kernel will win? I doubt it. The Linux kernel is over 30 years old and has resisted multiple attempts to fork. In all cases, it was the winner. What is different this time?

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

#869

Post by jabwd »

lII1lIlI11ll wrote: post #853
okanat wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the minority maintainers scream every time they see other languages due to their insecurities, technical inability and stubbornness, and their overreactions get a pass, it is not the fault of Rust, C++ or Swift. The source of the disturbance is not the people who are making an effort to cause as little disturbance. Blatant NIMBYism is the problem here and you cannot reduce it by accepting everything.

In general, upstreaming code to Linux involves interacting with difficult and sometimes outright hostile people. I've certainly had my share of both with much smaller changes. IMO pushing something like R4L requires very thick skin and almost infinite amount of patience. Bitching about that won't get you far, you need to be able to either work with or around those people.

This again gets back to the main point which you keep misrepresenting. This has nothing to do with a thick skin, this is a core subsystem maintainer outright saying they won't support R4L, which means its dead.

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

#870

Post by roca »

mook wrote: post #656
roca wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's way more painful to contribute to the kernel than contribute to Firefox, at least, unless things have changed since I was involved with Firefox. Suppose you find a bug in the kernel and come up with a patch. You email the patch to some kernel mailing list and ask for feedback. Typically, you will receive no response whatsoever, because no-one is responsible for responding. You can try emailing random developers…

I haven't touched Gecko in a decade, but your second paragraph sounds like my experience. My best record was something like a single character bug fix taking months (might have been years?). Yes, the review flag was set to the right person. I still remember the story where some other guys had to meet some Mozilla folks for lunch and nag them for reviews…

I'm sorry you had a bad experience with someone, but at least you know who wasn't doing their job. On the kernel side, you don't.
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