Hector Martin – [Patch] Maintainers: Remove Myself • Hacker News Board

Re: Hector Martin – [Patch] Maintainers: Remove Myself

#51

Post by pulsartwin » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

uecker wrote: post #47

pulsartwin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sabotage /ˈsabətɑː(d)ʒ/ verb 1. deliberately destroy, damage, or * obstruct* (something), especially for political or military advantage. 2. to intentionally prevent the success of a plan or action. Definitions from Oxford, Collins, and Cambridge all fit the bill. Even dictionary.com has "any undermining of a cause."

Yes, and now compare to what happened. You could differentiate between words and actions and what exactly was affected. For someone to "sabotage the Rust experiment in the kernel" you would need to determinate that that person did something that a) effectively damaged / obstructed the project (which - if GP is right about that that person has no power to stop the merging of the patch anyway - is a dubious claim), etc…

If you don't think what Hellwig did obstructed the project, then I guess we fundamentally disagree. Again, the R4L folks could work around this by getting the code pulled in by Linus, but that doesn't stop the fact that a senior maintainer has made it explicit that they will do everything in their power to stop this.

Code that wasn't his to reject was NACKed, causing a large amount of uncertainty about how to proceed with drivers that use DMA, and around the R4L project in general. At the absolute least, this is plain intent to sabotage (but IMO it is clearly more than intent at this stage). The core of what you are saying is that this has/will have absolutely no impact on anything to do with future R4L progress. The explosion of discussions around this exact topic across various forums with abundant disagreement from maintainers and R4L folks running counter to that idea are irrelevant I guess.

I'm not even a "rust person" and nobody has said anything about "being on the right side of history" except you. If that's how you see this discussion then we're not going to get anywhere. I wish you well, and urge you to in future engage in good faith and consider that not everybody is some boogeyman "on the true path" evangelist.

Re: Hector Martin – [Patch] Maintainers: Remove Myself

#52

Post by uecker » Sun, Feb 09, 2025, 9:26 AM UTC

pulsartwin wrote: post #51

uecker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and now compare to what happened. You could differentiate between words and actions and what exactly was affected. For someone to "sabotage the Rust experiment in the kernel" you would need to determinate that that person did something that a) effectively damaged / obstructed the project (which - if GP is right about that that person has no power to stop the merging of the patch anyway - is a dubious claim), etc…

If you don't think what Hellwig did obstructed the project, then I guess we fundamentally disagree. Again, the R4L folks could work around this by getting the code pulled in by Linus, but that doesn't stop the fact that a senior maintainer has made it explicit that they will do everything in their power to stop this. Code that wasn't his to reject was NACKed, causing a large amount of uncertainty about how to proceed…

A senior maintainer has a different opinion and expresses it. Your point seems to be that because he is not on board with the plan and expresses this, this is already "sabotage". Of course it makes things harder if not everybody agrees. But this is not the same thing that people disagreeing with your plan and say so do "sabotage". Sorry, this is ridiculous.

Re: Hector Martin – [Patch] Maintainers: Remove Myself

#53

Post by abacate » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 11:08 PM UTC

uecker wrote: post #52

pulsartwin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't think what Hellwig did obstructed the project, then I guess we fundamentally disagree. Again, the R4L folks could work around this by getting the code pulled in by Linus, but that doesn't stop the fact that a senior maintainer has made it explicit that they will do everything in their power to stop this. Code that wasn't his to reject was NACKed, causing a large amount of uncertainty about how to proceed…

A senior maintainer has a different opinion and expresses it. Your point seems to be that because he is not on board with the plan and expresses this, this is already "sabotage". Of course it makes things harder if not everybody agrees. But this is not the same thing that people disagreeing with your plan and say so do "sabotage". Sorry, this is ridiculous.

There is a large difference between "I do not think this is a good idea" vs "do not do this", in particular given the position Hellwig has in the kernel as a listed maintainer of the DMA mapping helpers.

No single technical reason was given besides a non-specific opinion on the "messiness" of multi-language projects.

Re: Hector Martin – [Patch] Maintainers: Remove Myself

#54

Post by abacate » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 11:23 PM UTC

menaerus wrote: post #16

steveklabnik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That question as already answered when the experiment was greenlit: it doesn’t have to at all. That question is also not what is at the heart of this conflict. It’s someone that categorically rejects the experiment, even though the project has decided to give it a try. It’s entirely social and not technical.

The reason is entirely technical and I think it has been formulated clearly - maintaining cross-language codebase, or one of the most important kernel modules FWIW in this case, certainly does not make things simpler but only more complex - communication-wise, time-wise, resource-wise, uncertainty-wise etc. I think this is pretty clear and not really debatable IMO. The actual question is if that overhead is worth it…

> The reason is entirely technical and I think it has been formulated clearly [..]

He clearly expressed a technical opinion based on his own beliefs, and that’s all. There was no reasoning.

He did not even acknowledge the fact that it is going to be maintained separately from the actual generic kernel code (rust/kernel/dma vs kernel/dma).

Anyone can easily formulate a sentence that seems coherent and correct, but it can be proven completely false in 15 seconds with actual data.

IOW: just because someone calls it a technical argument it doesn’t make it one.

This is a matter of opinion - specifically, the opinion of a single person.

> If there's a single most reason why Rust-in-Linux will fail it is going to be because of the immaturity and entitlement of individuals in Rust community.

Indeed there was immaturity from several individuals.

One question: if you act immaturely towards someone and they react immaturely, who's fault is it? The person who reacted or you?

I do not believe there is a widespread issue of entitlement: if you follow the discussions on the ML and observe how the R4L project has progressed so far, the only "entitlement" that individuals in the R4L project may seem to have in common is the desire to be treated with respect and for discussions to focus on technical arguments.

For me, this is the bare minimum to be expected.