Weekly Edition
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Quote of the week
Linux has a problem, which is that with success it is attracting
people with more skill than what it started with, and it is not
doing a very good job of handling that. In fact, it downright
stinks at it, behaving in the worst way it could choose for
handling that. We have lost quite a number of FS developers who
just don't want to deal with people who know less than they do but
are obnoxious and disrespectful to submissions because they enjoy
powertripping.
-- Hans Reiser (Log in to post comments)
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 0:48 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link] You know, I've often heard comments about Hans being obnoxious or flaming people in e-mail, or something, but I've never seen a post from him that was offensive. This one, for example, appears to be a sincere and respectful attempt to talk about a serious and emotionally charged issue.
Do other people "hear" Hans Reiser's voice differently than I do, or am I just reading the wrong e-mails? Maybe somebody could point out the posts to lkml which have earned him the reputation of being inflammatory.
Regards,
Zooko
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 1:00 UTC (Thu) by lyda (guest, #7429) [Link] Of course that post isn't offensive. Most people find irony quite entertaining.
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 4:52 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] ... and unintentional irony even more so.
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 6:43 UTC (Thu) by msmeissn (subscriber, #13641) [Link] This quote shows some standard rhetoric approach where you diminishthe knowledge of the reviewers, by indirectly implying this fact. It reads for me as a more or less direct attack against reviewers like Al Viro or Christoph. Ciao, Marcus
Quote of the week Posted Jul 29, 2006 0:32 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I didn't find it indirect at all, unless in the fact that Hans didn't name names. (In the past, he did name names -- I remember a full frontal attack on Christoph when they first met, comparing their respective ages as well as hairstyles).What's special about Hans isn't that he thinks he's more skilled than the people who are judging him -- the people with the power. There's a lot of that going around in engineering. It's that he says so -- as a debating tactic, no less. Whether for politeness or psychological manipulation, people usually keep that opinion to themselves. What's more surprising is how flameproof the Linux developers are. LKML is a pretty hostile place, and those that remain there seem to be able to let such insults roll right off them, and the reviewers in question kept working with Hans on the issues as if he hadn't brought up the ad hominen stuff.
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 8:06 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] He is obnoxious. This amounts to whining.Oh, the ext4 developers are treated so-and-so, they get into the mainline from the get go. We poor Reiser-developers are discriminated against on purely political reasons. Like for example that the evil people reviewing code aren't mature enough to deal with people OBVIOUSLY much more clever than themselves !. He doesn't state it just exactly like that, but that's how it comes trough.
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 20:10 UTC (Thu) by Lovechild (subscriber, #3592) [Link] To his credit Hans has improved a lot in recent history and he is very responsive to comments on his code. I think everyone should lay off him for a while, it must be exausting to have your code sitting in -mm for +2 years and having nobody do anything about it despite having addressed every issue pointed out.
So give Hans (and peace for that matter) a chance, he is doing good work and his attitude has really improved a lot.
Quote of the week Posted Jul 29, 2006 23:07 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] actually, he hasn't come close to addressing every issue with his code.
specificly there is still a huge issue with his plugin approach. it's a case of him and the kernel developers just not agreeing on the basic concept of havng that functionality in a filesystem
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 9:26 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] Not knowing how things look like on lkml, I found this quote obnoxious and flaming, although in a cleverly subtle way. In essence he is just saying that "I'm right you are wrong" or perhaps more bluntly "you are stupid". Kind of like a kid in kindergarten when others don't want to play his game.There is an uncomfortable little factoid that is the counterargument to Hans'. He is saying that Linus & co were lucky to get this far but should now relinguish control to him (I assume) since they really don't know what they're doing. The only problem is that Linus with friends are the ones who made what Linux is today, clearly by definition it cannot have overgrown them. If Hans thinks he can make a better Linux than Linus, there is nothing that should stop him really: It's Free Software and all that you know... I have nothing against Reiser4, it is good to have people trying to do things never done before. But there is no reason to expect that others will always adapt to your wishes.
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 14:32 UTC (Thu) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link] Exactly. "You linux people are far inferior in skill to the people that your project, by its own merits, has attracted. However, because of your poor interpersonal skills, and the fact that you simply cannot acknowledge your betters, these clever people are scared away by the requirement that their code must be judged by their inferiors."
The inferiors Hans refers to are the people that have tried to help him get Reiser4 to play nice with the kernel's way of doing things. Their expertise, which he pooh-poohs, is in making things that work within the kernel, or making things to work with the kernel. And genius programmers work in the same C as the rest of the kernel plebes. It is not the case that the kernel developers can't understand good work and high skill. It is definitely the case that the kernel also selects for people of high clue.
The FS developers that Hans refers to -- assuming he isn't being grandiose -- have likely also come in with the same lack of clue if they think that submission review is for the purpose of "powertripping", and that "Fix your code so that it works within the kernel design" is obnoxious.
Quote of the week Posted Jul 27, 2006 16:49 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] > Exactly. "You linux people are far inferior in skill to the people that> your project, by its own merits, has attracted. However, because of > your poor interpersonal skills, and the fact that you simply cannot > acknowledge your betters, these clever people are scared away by the > requirement that their code must be judged by their inferiors."
Funny, one of the clever people supposedly scared away responded to the
> Both Jim Mostek and I left under our own steam at different times, Jim
Quote of the week Posted Jul 28, 2006 4:59 UTC (Fri) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] Okay, how about http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/04/msg00412.html where he throws out "asian" as a slur (to insult Debian)?
Quote of the week Posted Aug 5, 2006 19:14 UTC (Sat) by millenix (guest, #39711) [Link] He actually was not using "asian" as a slur as you suggest, but as the most concise representation of differing social norms between scholarly communities in eastern Asian societies and western societies. I don't know how far this extends, but in Chinese tradition, attribution of work receives a far lower priority than correct results and usage.
I ran into this like a brick wall this summer, when I was reading background papers for a research project that I was joining. I noticed a flagrant instance of plagiarism (two complete paragraphs, with no reference at all to the original source), and got very different reactions when I brought this up to different professors. The American born and educated program director was ahgast and suggested that we report this find to the IEEE; my project mentor, of Chinese extraction and education, saw this as perfectly acceptable behaviour, because the semantic contents of the duplicated text were fairly basic knowledge in the particular discipline.
Who Posted Jul 27, 2006 12:44 UTC (Thu) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link] Anyone know who he is refering to as being lost by the Linux community?
Who Posted Jul 27, 2006 12:46 UTC (Thu) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link] eeh, sorry for that... I should have read the mail.. ;-) He was talking about the XFS team.
Who Posted Jul 27, 2006 13:42 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] And I'm not even sure he was right, because one of the XFS developers healluded to ended up responding to the thread.
I think Hans is a smart guy and he's got an innovative filesystem. A year
KernelTrap.org "Linux: Filesystems, Politics and the Kernel" Posted Jul 27, 2006 14:56 UTC (Thu) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link] The full exchange is captured by KernelTrap.org "Linux: Filesystems, Politics and the Kernel"
what Hans is right about Posted Jul 28, 2006 16:48 UTC (Fri) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link] I don't follow lkml and don't have the full context for this, but Hans does in his way point out an unfortunate aspect of Linux development. Rather like wikipedia, Linux tends to discount and even disparage expertise. As Linus himself puts it, Linux was not designed, it evolved. Linux developers are only willing to consider immediate solutions to obvious problems, and while this helps maintain focus and avoid overengineering, it leaves out those with the talent and experience to design, to look ahead and address the problems that haven't been encountered yet but will. "Show me the code" is the stifling response to design discussions that become the least bit abstract. Dare I say it, but while the core developers may not have the background and aptitude for such discussion (the numerous short-sighted decisions in Linux's history attest to this), there are those who do. If Linux could benefit from their insights, it would improve much faster.
what Hans is right about Posted Jul 29, 2006 19:30 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] You can babble on a mailing list about something for months or you can hack out a prototype. Which technique do you suppose will be more instructive? Which will produce a usable product faster? In my experience, most projects die of overdesign. Have you read Brooks? He speaks about much more than just project scheduling.
And, if by "disparage expertise" you mean that all developers are treated more or less equally, regardless of their experience, well, you might be right!
what Hans is right about Posted Jul 29, 2006 21:12 UTC (Sat) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link] You can babble on a mailing list about something for months or you can hack out a prototype.Writing kernel code, even a prototype, is quite hard and time-consuming. At the beginning of a project, this time is better spent on the design. Which technique do you suppose will be more instructive?You've given a false choice, obviously. Thoughtful design, on-paper analysis, modelling in a formal or semi-formal language are all highly instructive (and they don't require chasing down oopses!). Writing a prototype is also instructive, but bang-for-time, it may not be the best. I have known gifted designers who could write a spec much faster than they could write the code--and the spec proved implementable and solved the problem! NB: Most people can't do this. But some can. Maybe our disagreement comes down to whether such people really exist. My experience says yes. Sure, overdesign is a danger. It's critical to identify the good designers and not listen to every babbling bozo (which may be hard in and of itself). And ever then not every design will work. But there are big payoffs too. And, if by "disparage expertise" you mean that all developers are treated more or less equally, regardless of their experience, well, you might be right!Come on, that is patently false. Linus is treated very differently from most developers, and the same to a greater or lesser extent goes for the rest of the pantheon. The problem is that writing Linux code is the only way to get any respect among Linux developers, who are generally indifferent to the other accomplishments and expertise of a would-be contributer.
what Hans is right about Posted Jul 29, 2006 23:05 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] if you are willing to invest the time to readk the kernel list (and yes, it does take quite a bit of time) you will find that the kernel developers are not at all opposed to people designing things for the long-term, it's just that they are not willing to pay attention to people who say 'stop what you're doing and wait for someone to design this'
there are quite a number of very experianced people who pop up on the kernel list once in a while to weigh in on something. when they do they are listened to and things are useually adjusted to accomodate them.
the situation is something like this
code that works trumps a design that's not implemented
and in all cases evolutionary changes win over rip-out-and-replace (although there are some kernel developers who are famous for long patch series that incrementaly replace core functionality, the key is that each stop stands alone)
none of this sits especially well with a lot of the 'specify, design, then code' folks. however if they keep working rather then getting discouraged the results of their work does stand a good chance of being accepted
what Hans is right about Posted Aug 4, 2006 0:12 UTC (Fri) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link] I haven't kept up to date with the resier4 debate (if much has changed with it) but from what I got at the time of it beginning, the reasons it was rejected were actually more to do with long term design than current implementation; the belief that chunks of his code would be better places in the VFS layer rather than in the filesystem itself, that way, other/future filesystems could use the same plugins and model. So the "long term design goals" argument doesn't really apply as much as it might seem.
(no that wasn't worded very well, but it should be clear what I mean ;-)
skill level of developers Posted Aug 3, 2006 16:08 UTC (Thu) by pb (guest, #39658) [Link] There are people that I have met who are smarter and more skilled at tasks than myself, and I respect them for that. However that intelligence and skill does not always translate into success, e.g. due to work habits, people skills, etc.
It can be beneficial to have a code reviewer or code manager that is less skilled at a task than the developer writing and submitting the code.
An extremely intelligent and skilled developer can write code that only he can understand. That code can be inadequately documented or beyond the ability of other developers to maintain or use. When a skilled developer needs to have code accepted by someone less skilled than himself this may require a process of documentation, education, and possibly some rewriting to make it understandable. Arguably such modified code will then be of higher quality and of higher value to the community.
skill level of developers Posted Aug 8, 2006 11:19 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] I see some arrogance of the uneducated here. Yes, there is a value for simple, easy to understand code. This value is that it is easy to understand. It might contradict the thing you want to achieve. Sometimes you need some "magic" which normal coders don't understand. You might want to discuss this with such a "normal coder" to make sure it gets documented properly, but you don't want to change the code. For the "insult" that Linux started out with not very skilled persons: I think that's why Linux took up so many developers quickly, but scared away too elite ones. From the very start, Linus insulted people who really know better - think of the famous Andrew Tanenbaum "Linux is obsolete" flamewar. The problem with microkernels is not that they don't work (QNX was a very sane and working Unix-like real-time microkernel even back then), but that they fail so often, because this way of doing an OS requires definitely higher skill levels than doing it the Linux way. I don't know how to solve that, probably the elite programmers should rather gather around a more elitist development circle and do their own operating system (maybe start with Plan9), before porting their stuff back to Linux.
Quote of the week Posted Aug 3, 2006 17:39 UTC (Thu) by leandro (subscriber, #1460) [Link] Funny thing is that Reiser himself can be quite stupid in quite fundamental things. His famous whitepaper justifying his second-system filesystem dismisses the relational model of data management just like that, and then from that start he started building his castle without ever having understood the fundamental, theoretical, proven concepts behind data models.
All his efforts are doomed, then, by a combination of ignorance and arrogance.
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