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We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

lore.kernel.org

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Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

#101

Post by chris_wot »

muamoe wrote: post #79
chris_wot wrote: post #70

I would be more likely to want to listen to T'so if he hadn't done the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s There was a reasonable discussion about Rust, and then T'so drops the bombshell: "I suspect part of the problem here is you're trying to convince everyone to switch over to the religion as promulgated by Rust and the reality is that ain't going to happen because we have 50 plus file sy…

Maybe they're tired of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force.

Which means they can't explain interface semantics?

Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

#102

Post by cosmic_cheese »

pabs3 wrote: post #65
beeflet wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cool idea but it's licensed MIT instead of GPL or something copyleft so I won't contribute to it. Rust-only ecosystem would be pretty cool though. It may be worth just forking linux for the sake of compatibility, and keeping the license going. I don't see a future otherwise. I'd also like to see better compiler diversity. Maybe once gccrs rolls around we will see different attitudes around rust emerge, compare…

The Rust community does seem to be more focused on non-copyleft licenses, do you have any ideas why that is?

I’m not part of the Rust community, but I imagine it’s similar to Swift’s in that most of its members have day jobs as corporate devs.

Most of them at some point have been stung by finding a library that perfectly solves their problem, only to notice that it’s licensed GPLv3 (or similar) and thus the legal dept won’t let them touch it with a ten foot pole (and/or interfacing with that dept is not worth the bother). They’d rather not put others in that predicament and want their work to be useful to as wide of a spectrum of devs as possible.

Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

#103

Post by taurknaut »

patrick451 wrote: post #52
arjie wrote: post #19

The factors at play are all obvious. The old-school guys want to keep things old-school. The new-school guys want to make things better in a new way. Has there been any new rewrite without a BFDL who himself is of the new school? The vim/neovim schism happened and perhaps that's how it ends. I personally like Neovim and I'm glad to be in backers.md and it's a tremendously larger amount of work than to have just chang…

> The new-school guys want to make things better in a new way. The new guys definitely want to make things different, but it seems there is a lot of debate over whether it will actually be better. Really, they should just write their own their kernel. If rust is really that much better, they'll will.

Well I certainly don't use linux because it's written in C. Who would?

Edit: This seems like more of an indication of a culture that lacks effective conflict resolution than any kind of technical question.

Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

#105

Post by harimau777 »

ecshafer wrote: post #94
mschoch wrote: post #50

[flagged]

[flagged]

I think that there's potentially a couple of things at play here:

Taken literally, the idea of a "thin blue line" protecting society from chaos has some authoritarian overtones.

It's a slogan that tends to be used to simply dismiss problems like police brutality. That is to say, it comes across less like a difference in policy position and more like indifference to the suffering of others.

The political faction that it's associated with, i.e. MAGA, is currently in the process of attempting to purge anyone with a worldview that they dislike from public society.

All of those factors creates a situation where it is difficult for those who use signifiers like "thin blue line" to practically operate simply as "people who happen to be conservative" as opposed to "people who represent an irreconcilable threat to people they disagree with".

Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

#106

Post by microtherion »

beeflet wrote: post #100
reactordev wrote: post #9

The problem is aging code sours like milk. I empathize but we need to have people take over these initiatives and refactor them into something easier the maintain. Not saying introduce a new language or anything but change how we fundamentally look at “The Kernel”. I think reducing scope and making it so hardware providers must maintain their drivers is a good start. If your toolchain doesn’t suffice, create a new to…

>Bring solutions. Tech debt is just OpEx to everyone else. What if there was a rust compiler to C, that produced like readable, compliant C code for the kernel. And then developers that want to work in rust can publish their original rust code to some third party location, so the reviewers have no idea if the C code they receive it was originally written in rust or not.

And what happens if somebody starts modifying that C code? Even a one way translator like you describe could be a challenge, making it two way seems close to impossible.

Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

#109

Post by aqueueaqueue »

beeflet wrote: post #100
reactordev wrote: post #9

The problem is aging code sours like milk. I empathize but we need to have people take over these initiatives and refactor them into something easier the maintain. Not saying introduce a new language or anything but change how we fundamentally look at “The Kernel”. I think reducing scope and making it so hardware providers must maintain their drivers is a good start. If your toolchain doesn’t suffice, create a new to…

>Bring solutions. Tech debt is just OpEx to everyone else. What if there was a rust compiler to C, that produced like readable, compliant C code for the kernel. And then developers that want to work in rust can publish their original rust code to some third party location, so the reviewers have no idea if the C code they receive it was originally written in rust or not.

The output of a compiler produce unidiomatic code. And if the C gets edited you need to back port to Rust which is more work and may be impossible.

Try what you said with even well align languages like TS and JS and it would be hard to work with.

Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

#110

Post by skrtskrt »

A fundamental problem here not yet discussed directly here is how few maintainers there really are for a software project of this magnitude and importance. Further, the fact that so many of those maintainers are purely on volunteer time.

Now it is certainly somewhat the fault of the maintainers themselves for turning off thousand if not tens of thousands of eager, well-intentioned wannabe contributors over the decades, if not through their attitudes and lack of interpersonal skills, then through impenetrable build systems and hostility towards ergonomic changes.

But forget the eager amateurs - it is unconscionable that major technology companies & cloud providers don't each have damn near an army helping out with Linux and similar technologies - even the parts that do not directly benefit them! - instead of just shoving it into servers so they can target ads for cheap plastic crap 0.000000001% better than they did last week.

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