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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#291

Post by oldpersonintx »

e40 wrote: post #157
bayindirh wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Putting my dusty Linux Distro Maintainer Hat on] First of all, I wholeheartedly applaud Marcan for carrying the project this far. They, both as individuals and as a team proper, did great things. What I can say is a rest is well deserved at this point, because he really poured his soul into this and worn himself down. On the other hand, I'll need to say something, however not in bad faith. He needs to stop fighting…

100% agree. For the last few years, I've been saying the following regularly (to friends, family and coworkers): communication is the hardest thing humans will ever do. Period. Going to the moon, launching rockets, building that amazing app... the hardest thing of all is communicating with other people to get it done. As a founder (for 40+ years and counting) I manage a lot of different type of people and communicati…

> (yes, this is direct from stoicism)

stoics don't write multi-paragraph goodbye letters

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#292

Post by kittikitti »

Ygg2 wrote: post #43
superkuh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Did you read the article? Did you read the rest of it? Sure Apple being not as great to develop drivers, but ~99% of the article is about displeasure working with Linux maintainers. EDIT: Here is the breakdown by paragraphs. | Paragraph # | Tone | | ----------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 1 | History recap | | 2 | History recap | | 3 | mentions Apple and M1 in po…

This is a beautiful and well done table. The exact formatting and the inclusion of extra statistics are appreciated.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#293

Post by infamouscow »

bombcar wrote: post #185
chongli wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brigading has no place in open source communities. There are some members of the Rust community who believe C is obsolete and that C programmers should either switch to Rust or get out of the way. This is an extremely toxic attitude that has no place in the Linux kernel! The fact remains: Rust doesn’t solve all of C’s problems. It trades them off for a whole lot of new problems, many of which are challenging to addre…

The solution will be to rewrite the kernel in Zig!

My impression is the average Zig programmer is more interested in making a better Linux than trying to prove Zig can be used in Linux.

There are _already_ dozens of hobby OS projects and embedded groups doing systems work in Zig. Everyone knows Zig is a systems language. It doesn't have a chip on their shoulder.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#294

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

selectnull wrote: post #233
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My perspective is it might be a chicken-or-egg problem. I would willingly donate to the Asahi project...if/when I were to buy a Macbook for the purpose of running Asahi Linux on it. And I've been watching from the sidelines, waiting for Asahi Linux to become "stable" enough to consider buying a Macbook and putting Asahi Linux on it.

I was an early donator to marcan and never expected any delivery from Asahi project, just thought that the idea of having Linux of Apple Silicon was awesome and worthy of my support. But then marcan told his supportes to fuck off unless they commit to supporting his political ideas, which I was not willing to do. I guess this comment will be seen as abuse from the HN crowd. Oh well...

He seems to take a lot of things that are fairly neutral or merely untactful as being bad faith. Like the "thin blue line" comment by Dr Greg. Sure the whole thing blue line thing in reference to the police misrepresents their role in society (police in most western countries are fairly useless at best and actively harmful at worse), but Occam's razor just suggests that Dr Greg was just making a tactless remark rather than being super pro po-po.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#296

Post by mcherm »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #266
nindalf wrote: post #93

Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o ( https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.ed... ) that is interesting to read. Although it starts on a polarising note ("thin blue line"), it does a good job of explaining the difficulties that Linux maintainers face and why they make the choices they do. It makes sense to be extremely adversarial about accepting code because they're on the hook for maintaining…

Thank you to share the Ted T'so LKM post. Can you explain the culture reference "thin blue line"? I never heard it before.

In the US, this is a reference to the belief that members of law enforcement should be loyal folirst to other members of law enforcement and only secondarily to the law. Or at least that is how I have always understood it.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#297

Post by cogman10 »

LinXitoW wrote: post #213
cogman10 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I think it went too far. The fact is, you need buy in from other devs and if a dev won't buy in you need to work out a way to avoid them or avoid conflict. It sucks, it slows things down, but frankly making it a "them vs us" is a sure fire way to make them oppose any change you want to make. Public shaming even more disastrous as there's no better way to entrench someone in a position.

But the point is that the Rust developers have tried literally everything else. If the C developers make it a "Them vs Us" thing, there IS NO ALTERNATIVE for the Rust developers. Linus' reaction is quite literally the equivalent of a parent only punishing the loudest child, not the child that's been silently bullying that kid for months.

Don't know what to tell you. The C developers have the keys of the kingdom. It's up to the rust devs to appease them. When you are a new-comer to an old project a big part of that is working with the current gatekeepers to get your changes through in a way they'll accept. That can sometimes mean doing things sub optimally in your view.

In particular, the DMA maintainer didn't want rust code in their DMA subsystem. That sucks, but it means you need to relocate your dma bridge code out of their subsystem. It does mean your driver will be a second-class citizen in the kernel tree (which was always going to be the case for rust).

Linus' reaction was to someone who started a public campaign against another kernel developer and tried to use that following to pressure the maintainers of the kernel to bend to the will of the newcommer. I'm sorry, but I'd also have a pretty negative reaction to that.

The workplace equivalent is you publishing a whistle blowing article against a team in your company because they'd not accept a pull request you worked very hard on. You don't do that. You handle things internally and privately and sometimes you tell the boss "sorry, I can't get this done because another team is blocking the change and they are unwilling to work with me".

And do not mistake my post. I'm not siding with the C dev just because I'm critiquing the rust dev. Guy sounds like he's too stuck in his way. The problem is you don't get a big well working and long running project like the kernel without having these sorts of long-term maintainers that make the calls and shots on what to reject.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#298

Post by surajrmal »

LinXitoW wrote: post #203
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"spreading awareness about a position" isn't a very accurate way to describe what happened. This is the guy who said he wanted to use social media to create a "hall of shame" for kernel developers. Of course Linus told him to knock it off, that's ridiculously unprofessional behavior.

The issue is that Linus put the Rust developers in an impossible position: On the one hand he approved Rust in the kernel, but then never ever ever has the balls to enforce that decision. Then, the fanatical C developers openly sabotage and work against all the Rust developers efforts. So, the last option for the Rust developers is to take it to social media. Otherwise, the C developers get away with creating a self…

The thread didn't really have drama before marcan stirred the pot. There was a disagreement, but the individuals pushing for the merge were not attempting to escalate, only try to find a path forward in a way that might make both parties happy with the compromise. The drama and social media outrage arguably did nothing to help, and as far as I can tell, simply makes for good entertainment for onlookers who like to gossip. While it would be nice to have Linus help out here with a clear resolution after escalation, it's clear to me that the behavior marcan displayed is the higher priority problem to address.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#299

Post by reshlo »

LinXitoW wrote: post #203
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"spreading awareness about a position" isn't a very accurate way to describe what happened. This is the guy who said he wanted to use social media to create a "hall of shame" for kernel developers. Of course Linus told him to knock it off, that's ridiculously unprofessional behavior.

The issue is that Linus put the Rust developers in an impossible position: On the one hand he approved Rust in the kernel, but then never ever ever has the balls to enforce that decision. Then, the fanatical C developers openly sabotage and work against all the Rust developers efforts. So, the last option for the Rust developers is to take it to social media. Otherwise, the C developers get away with creating a self…

I agree. Everyone here seems to be criticising Marcan for not being professional, but it’s very difficult to remain professional when the people you’re working with gloat in public that they intend to completely sabotage your work product despite it being given explicit support by the CEO. Why are you the only one criticising the coworkers? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this thread.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#300

Post by sharpshadow »

selectnull wrote: post #233
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My perspective is it might be a chicken-or-egg problem. I would willingly donate to the Asahi project...if/when I were to buy a Macbook for the purpose of running Asahi Linux on it. And I've been watching from the sidelines, waiting for Asahi Linux to become "stable" enough to consider buying a Macbook and putting Asahi Linux on it.

I was an early donator to marcan and never expected any delivery from Asahi project, just thought that the idea of having Linux of Apple Silicon was awesome and worthy of my support. But then marcan told his supportes to fuck off unless they commit to supporting his political ideas, which I was not willing to do. I guess this comment will be seen as abuse from the HN crowd. Oh well...

It sounds weird and somehow I don’t think it was communicated that way, even if I wasn’t there. You say he said I don’t want your money unless you follow my ideology? Did he then send you the money back after checking your social media?

Out of curiosity what are his political views? It has been mentioned a couple of times here already and it seems to be part of the story.

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