Live data from Hacker News

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

741–750 of 1001 posts

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, so you boot your custom OS, and you can... I guess display a terminal and maybe talk to the disk? How do you use the hardware without drivers? Did Apple document their hardware interfaces?

The fact that Apple re-uses components from very long time ago in their SoCs is what enabled Asahi Linux to be where it is in the timeframe it took with the staff they had. Obviously marcan, lina and the others involved are damn geniuses, but even they built on the research of others like iPodLinux that laid foundational groundwork.

But the comment you replied to argues that maintaining those drivers is a nightmare because of lack of cooperation from the manufacturer. What you're saying is that Apple hasn't had the inclination to rip up the floor from under them, but that's an inherently unstable situation that could change at any time.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does disliking C++ make it odd that he is open to Rust? C++ is uniquely bad; disliking it doesn’t necessarily mean you only like C.

At this point you have a community of maintainers who expect it to remain a C project. Which is very logical. If you add Rust, why not Zig, Nim, and every other low level language?

I can't find the exact link now (very well might have been a video without a searchable transcript), but I recall someone asking Linus that (specifically re his previous comments on C++), and his answer was something like he saw Rust solving a problem that C genuinely does not. It's controversial, but I do think of C++, Zig, etc as solving the "same problems" as C (perhaps in a much nicer way)

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a motto used by American law enforcement to justify extrajudicial punishment. Since they are the "thin blue line" that separates the public from anarchy, they are justified in acting independently to "protect" us when judges and juries do not "cooperate".

That is a very strange take. The phrase isn't American and has no negative connotation. It has nothing to do with "extrajudicial punishment". It simply refers to the (obvious) fact that what separates societies from anarchy is the "thin blue line" of law enforcement. Rowan Atkinson had a sitcom set in a London police station in the 90s called "The Thin Blue Line". Are you under the impression he was dogwhistling abou…

This is what really confused me about the article. I read the mailing list post and had no idea what was controversial about thin blue line. In fact, I thought most of that post was fairly reasonable.

I'd never heard of the extrajudicial punishment aspect of the phrase (though I had heard the phrase itself) and it didn't show up when I googled, but I'm not American, so maybe there's some cultural differences.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#744

> But then also came the entitled users. This time, it wasn’t about stealing games, it was about features. “When is Thunderbolt coming?” “Asahi is useless to me until I can use monitors over USB-C” “The battery life sucks compared to macOS” (nobody ever complained when compared to x86 laptops…) “I can’t even check my CPU temperature” (yes, I seriously got that one). This sounds so rough. I can't imagine pouring your…

from what I've seen of his grandstanding on the LKML suggesting to bully people on social media, I've lost all respect for the guy. He is a person in power considering all his social media clout, and this is how he uses it. I'm glad he realizes that it's time to sit back and reflect. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. He will be of much more use to the community, and more importantly himself after confronting his ego.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get it. I think that might be the problem. It's comments like these that causes people to wear out.

> It's comments like these that causes people to wear out. No it isn't. You - fundamentally - don't get to control what people say to you. You need to filter how to take that. And that's incredibly hard. Especially in open source. You need to both be able to ignore (some version of "idiots, who can't be bothered to read") and be openminded enough to take weird requests, because they could be the starting point of a n…

> And that's incredibly hard

>You need to both be able to ignore

> and be openminded enough to ...

I'm know it's pretty pointless to argue because we see the world in a different way. But realize the (quoted) requirements are you putting on the open source developer.

A developer without these skills will burn out.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#746
post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years. It is unfortunately wrapped up in larger-scale outrage culture than just within tech/programming circles. Rust as a community is very gay and very trans: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Surve... https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Sur... To be clear I…

> Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question. How can you know this? What other communities even have such surveys? I would expect this to be similar in any language. Anecdotally, I see the % of gay/trans/neurodivergent to be much higher in the dev community than the general population, so the numbers don’t look strange to me. Perhaps it’s more vocal or more vi…

> Perhaps it’s more vocal or more visible

If a tree is felled in a forest and the logger doesn't tell you she's trans, does it make a sound?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#747

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.

Background Story https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a869236a-1d59-4524-a86b-be08a15... https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a869236a-1d59-4524-a86b-be08a15... https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a869236a-1d59-4524-a86b-be08a15... https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a869236a-1d59-4524-a86b-be08a15... 1. I think the the DMA maintainer is correct. Don't intertwine implementation languages, that is bad idea and a maintenance hell. 2. Social media "…

And here are the Hector's posts on Mastodon, now deleted:

https://archive.is/uLiWX https://archive.is/rESxe

"Behold, a Linux maintainer openly admitting to attempting to sabotage the entire Rust for Linux project (...) Personally, I would consider this grounds for removal of Christoph from the Linux project on Code of Conduct violation grounds, but sadly I doubt much will happen other than draining a lot of people's energy and will to continue the project until Linus says "fuck you" or something. (...)"

"Thinking of literally starting a Linux maintainer hall of shame. Not for public consumption, but to help new kernel contributors know what to expect. Every experienced kernel submitter has this in their head, maybe it should be finally written down."

"Okay I literally just started this privately and the first 3 names involved are all people named variants on "Christ". Maybe there's a pattern here... religion secretly trying to sabotage the Linux kernel behind the scenes??? Edit: /s because apparently some people need it."

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#748
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false? Many discussions online (and offline) suffer from a huge-group of people who just can't stop themselves from making their knee-jerk reactions public, and then not thinking about it more. I remember the "Filesystem in Rust" video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s ) whe…

The speaker doesn't understand the audience question and doesn't respond to it. The audience member points out that they shouldn't encode the semantics into the Rust type system because that would mean that refactoring the C code breaks Rust, which is not an acceptable situation. The speaker responds to this by saying essentially "tell me what the semantics are and I'll encode them in the Rust type system." That's ma…

I disagree, they didn't straight out pointed this, because this is nonsense. Semantic changes can break anything, even if it's some intermediary API.

There are more breakage in rust due to the type-system-related semantics, but ideally a C dev would also want their system to break if the semantics aren't right. So this is a criticism on C..?

So following this argument, they don't want Rust because C falls short? Nonsense.

edit: The speaker did mention that they didn't want to force limited use on the base APIs, but that for a great deal of their usage, they could have determined fixed semantics, and make intermediary APIs for it. So this was not about limiting the basic APIs.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are free to think whatever they want, and, if they what to rewrite things in Rust or whatever language, that's how many of us learn! Yes, they're free to rewrite their own projects in Rust. They aren't free to force others to do the same to their projects. That's what this is all about: a prominent R4L community leader tried to use brigading and shaming to force a Linux kernel maintainer into accepting and mai…

>Yes, they're free to rewrite their own projects in Rust. They aren't free to force others to do the same to their projects. That's what this is all about: a prominent R4L community leader tried to use brigading and shaming to force a Linux kernel maintainer into accepting and maintaining Rust code (along with the entire toolchain to support it). Nobody tried to force Christoph into accepting or maintaining Rust code…

They're offering to maintain it themselves but that's not good enough for long-term maintainers. It's like when a teenager brings home a puppy and promises to take care of it. The parents know that they will be the ones looking after it eventually.

I wish I knew of a less condescending analogy but I think it gets the point across. The list of former kernel maintainers is extremely long. Anyone who leaves the project, as marcan did, leaves all of their code for someone else to maintain. This is not a problem for drivers which can be left orphaned. For all other code it is a problem!

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#750

Staying away from the emotional part of this blog post. I was about to write a question to ask why, if these downstreams are forked, that it is such a big deal to be gatekeeping the upstream and I think I got my answer from this: "In fact, the Linux kernel development model is (perhaps paradoxically) designed to encourage upstreaming and punish downstream forks. While it is possible to just not care about upstream an…

I was thinking the same on this. It is a classic case of division of responsibility. The argument appears to be: should we force a small number of downstream maintainers to suffer a big maintenance burden or should we make upstream handle a smaller burden.

Martin's position rests on his claim that the big maintenance burden he would be forced to bear is unfair. I mean, he is the one who chose Rust. No one forced that on him. It is kind of hard for me to see his claim that the maintenance burden of his choice is somehow the responsibility of the upstream maintainers who are all C developers, no matter how small he insists such maintenance would be. My own opinion is that he made his bed, he needs to sleep in it. Or wait for the tides to change in his favor over Rust inclusion in the kernel. All of this crying foul just doesn't sit well with me.

Post reply on HN