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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

#151

Post by mustache_kimono »

skrtskrt wrote: post #84
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…

yeah he managed to try to sound reasonable and measured for most of that, then: > including an upstream language community which refuses to make any kind of backwards compatibility guarantees, and which is actively hostile to a second Rust compiler implementation (I suspect because it might limit their ability to make arbitrary backwards-incompatble language changes). with the full context of all of this it is quite…

>> including an upstream language community which refuses to make any kind of backwards compatibility guarantees, and which is actively hostile to a second Rust compiler implementation (I suspect because it might limit their ability to make arbitrary backwards-incompatble language changes).

The guy is a poster who just can't help himself! Both points are demonstrably false.

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

#153

Post by exabrial »

dralley wrote: post #123
exabrial wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The old-school guys want to keep things old-school. The new-school guys want to make things better in a new way The new school guys greatly underappreciate the wisdom of why and instead try to change things without first understanding.

This seems quite ironic to say when the whole drama started with Christoph not even looking at the patches long enough to see what directory they were in before rejecting them.

Apologies, that I can onboard with, I was just speaking about the comment.

The old school guys do things for a certain reason that young contributors often don't appreciate. Enough violations of that, and you're often ignored. Perhaps thats what has happened here?

Clearly this is a communication problem more than anything else.

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

#154

Post by mindslight »

milesrout wrote: post #139
MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a left winger, and I generally respect the police, but everybody I've met with a "thin blue line" American flag decal or sticker has been a total asshole. It's not just hatred of the police. Connotations change over time, and the general connotation of "the thin blue line" in the US at the moment is unabashed support of far-right authoritarianism.

The phrase has nothing to do with any flags used much later by US policemen. That is the whole point of the thread. >far-right authoritarianism Get a grip. Even if it were a reference to what you say it is, that has nothing to do with the "far right". It is stock standard centre-right (and centre-left for that matter) position in the US to support the police in principle (if not, obviously, in every action theyve eve…

Regardless of its history, the current popularity of the phrase is most certainly part of the neofascist movement in the US. Its rise was a direct response to the "Black Lives Matter" call for accountability - essentially doubling down on asserting that lawless behavior by the police is justified in service of some authoritarian "order", regardless of the destruction of everyone else's rights. In a free society, the police are a necessary institution [0] for upholding the law, not a special class of enforcers unbound by it.

[0] how do you think police get so biased against everyone else to begin with? they're effectively dealing with the shittiest rungs of society on repeat, so they form a pattern and end up applying it to everyone they meet

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

#155

Post by cle »

shkkmo wrote: post #135
skrtskrt wrote: post #110

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 decade…

> Further, the fact that so many of those maintainers are purely on volunteer time. Greg pointed out in that email thread that: > over 80% of the contributions come from company-funded developers. [1] [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2025020738-observant-rocklike-7...

Is that really the right statistic? Seems like the relevant one would be the number of maintainers whose maintenance work is company-funded. (Ex, I'd imagine it would be quite bad if most contributions were from company-funded developers but had to be upstreamed by non-company-funded volunteers.)

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

#156

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

llm_trw wrote: post #129
MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that they might want their drivers to actually work on people's existing Linux systems without having to force them to use a forked kernel. It's like telling people who want JPEGXL in Firefox to "just" fork the browser, ignoring the massive extra effort that you actually have to convince everybody to use your fork instead of the original.

What extra effort? If you match upstream it's a drop in replacement and anyone who cares will use it. If they don't it's because they don't care.

And what if they do care, but they simultaneously need features available in multiple different forks? You can't run two kernels at the same time.

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

#157

Post by thwarted »

lucianbr wrote: post #134
muamoe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, the entitlement here is absolutely amazing. You are not entitled to any work, or explanation, or "agreement". Show me where it says maintainers owe you any of this at all.

Can you show where it says maintainers are entitled to be free from criticism on the internet?

Can you show where it says those who criticize are entitled to be listened to on the internet?

It works both ways. If you have a beef, don't be surprised if someone responds to it in a way you don't expect or like.

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

#159

Post by dralley »

exabrial wrote: post #153
dralley wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems quite ironic to say when the whole drama started with Christoph not even looking at the patches long enough to see what directory they were in before rejecting them.

Apologies, that I can onboard with, I was just speaking about the comment. The old school guys do things for a certain reason that young contributors often don't appreciate. Enough violations of that, and you're often ignored. Perhaps thats what has happened here? Clearly this is a communication problem more than anything else.

That's not what happened here.

https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/2b9b75d1-eb8e-494a-b0...

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

#160

Post by shkkmo »

cle wrote: post #155
shkkmo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Further, the fact that so many of those maintainers are purely on volunteer time. Greg pointed out in that email thread that: > over 80% of the contributions come from company-funded developers. [1] [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2025020738-observant-rocklike-7...

Is that really the right statistic? Seems like the relevant one would be the number of maintainers whose maintenance work is company-funded. (Ex, I'd imagine it would be quite bad if most contributions were from company-funded developers but had to be upstreamed by non-company-funded volunteers.)

From other discussion in that thread, it does appear that most maintainers are employed by companies to work on Linux. That doesn't mean that all the work these maintainers do is paid, as there are also comments indicating that many of these paid contributors do work on their own time when it doesn't align with their company priorities.

I posted that statistic to demonstrate that the kernal project isn't a typical underfunded, almost purely volunteer open source project as implied by many of the kneejerk comments here.

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