Calling yourself the “thin blue line” like a reference to police really doesn’t seem like a way to have an enduring community. Police don’t serve the community; I guess they think in the same way then.
> Police don’t serve the community Whom do they serve?
We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
51–60 of 186 posts
Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#52The 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 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.
Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#53The 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…
You are missing the whole point here. The kernel is a survival epic amongst millions of other failed projects. You don't get to tell the old captain and its lieutenants how to nail the planks and helm the ship when you just went pass the Titanic and Britannic wrecks because metal is so cool.
They're "old-school" because they have to be. Engineers will excrete their pet project and then leave and now they will have to support it. They are mean because that's the only "power" they have, as is explained in the post.
I'll leave you with this quote from "The Night Watch" by James Mickens (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf)
> This is not the world of the systems hacker. When you debug a distributed system or an OS kernel, you do it Texas-style. You gather some mean, stoic people, people who have seen things die, and you get some primitive tools, like a compass and a rucksack and a stick that’s pointed on one end, and you walk into the wilderness and you look for trouble, possibly while using chewing tobacco. As a systems hacker, you must be pre- pared to do savage things, unspeakable things, to kill runaway threads with your bare hands, to write directly to network ports using telnet and an old copy of an RFC that you found in the Vatican. When you debug systems code, there are no high- level debates about font choices and the best kind of turquoise, because this is the Old Testament, an angry and monochro- matic world, and it doesn’t matter whether your Arial is Bold or Condensed when people are covered in boils and pestilence and Egyptian pharaoh oppression. HCI people discover bugs by receiving a concerned email from their therapist. Systems people discover bugs by waking up and discovering that their first-born children are missing and “ETIMEDOUT ” has been written in blood on the wall. What is despair? I have known it—hear my song. Despair is when you’re debugging a kernel driver and you look at a mem- ory dump and you see that a pointer has a value of 7. THERE IS NO HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE THAT IS ALIGNED ON 7. Furthermore, 7 IS TOO SMALL AND ONLY EVIL CODE WOULD TRY TO ACCESS SMALL NUMBER MEMORY. Misaligned, small-number memory accesses have stolen decades from my life. The only things worse than misaligned, small-number memory accesses are accesses with aligned buf- fer pointers, but impossibly large buffer lengths. Nothing ruins a Friday at 5 P.M. faster than taking one last pass through the log file and discovering a word-aligned buffer address, but a buffer length of NUMBER OF ELECTRONS IN THE UNI- VERSE.
Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#54Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#55why cannot more people learn about git and branching you want your merges in? patch it in your own branch the real crux of the issue is the quality of " the offical version", the real issue, then, is about official branding. I remember back in the day there were multiple kernel versions by different mantainers.... then again I'm probably missing the forest for the trees or something
The kernel is continuously changing (which IMHO is also an issue), so keeping a fork requires a lot of work to continuously adapt to those changes. This is why forks made for specific devices are seldom updated for more than a few months (or a couple of years if you're very lucky).
I feel like this problem should have a technical solution.
maybe a VCS good enough that this isn't as big an issue? (along the lines of pijul?) or
maybe something from formal verification methods to better enforce or more clearly explain why some drivers cannot be accepted. then again, I don't think the computer science is quite there yet
Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like ignorance of the implications, not any desire to a tie themselves to a political stance. I think the “assume positive intent” principle needs to apply here.
Also, if you're not from the USA, you're more likely to associate it with the beloved Rowan Atkinson sitcom.
Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#57The 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 old-school guys want to keep things old-school. You are missing the whole point here. The kernel is a survival epic amongst millions of other failed projects. You don't get to tell the old captain and its lieutenants how to nail the planks and helm the ship when you just went pass the Titanic and Britannic wrecks because metal is so cool. They're "old-school" because they have to be. Engineers will excrete thei…
Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#58[flagged]
Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#59Calling yourself the “thin blue line” like a reference to police really doesn’t seem like a way to have an enduring community. Police don’t serve the community; I guess they think in the same way then.
> Police don’t serve the community Whom do they serve?
Re: We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality
#60Calling yourself the “thin blue line” like a reference to police really doesn’t seem like a way to have an enduring community. Police don’t serve the community; I guess they think in the same way then.
> Police don’t serve the community Whom do they serve?
Within capitalist societies police protect the interests of the state, which itself exists to serve and benefit the capitalist class. Police "maintain order" to ensure the proletariat continues to submit to the state and participate in the capitalist machine, and they commit violence against anyone who does otherwise.