Rambling

Posted Jan 31, 2025 10:58 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Rambling by LtWorf
Parent article: Resistance to Rust abstractions for DMA mapping

I can understand him not wanting any more work himself. BUT.

Let's say he was asked to go from 8 to 12 hours a day. Yes I know that's a lot - 50%.

However, his refusal means his boss now has to hire THREE full time guys to cope with the extra work he's caused.

There's pros and cons both ways - "I'm overloaded I don't want any more work" is perfectly okay. But when the boss is saying "hey these changes will take work OFF you (AND US)", then that refusal is long-term counter-productive.

The problem is, as Brookes observed, "throwing extra man-power at a project only makes it later". It's a "how do you square the circle" problem - fixing pain in the long term is only possible by increasing it in the short term.

And of course the real tragedy is that it's Christoph who's being going through a lot of other people's subsystems, spraying patches everywhere, precisely to do the exact same sort of cleanup that Rust does when it rationalises APIs!

Cheers,
Wol

Rambling

Posted Jan 31, 2025 15:45 UTC (Fri) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

Linus isn't his boss… so the dynamic is not quite as you describe it I think.

Rambling

Posted Feb 12, 2025 20:50 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

You are the one that introduced the "boss" concept into the mix. Replace "Linus" with "community" or "LKML" or some other concept that you prefer.

To extend the thought experiment though, without getting into a long debate over the politics of the kernel, let me ask you a question. Can Linus "fire" a kernel maintainer? Because, pragmatically speaking, I think the answer is "yes".

Linus has ultimate authority over what code gets merged into Linux. That this is a fact should not be controversial. That is, he can decide who to accept patches from. He can provide public guidance to others as to who he will accept patches from and what sub-systems he will accept those patches from. If Linus can remove a maintainer from their job and replace them with somebody else, I think that saying that Linus can "fire" a maintainer is a reasonable simplification of language.

For the purposes of this conversation, I think we can agree that calling Linus "the boss" is a similar simplification of language. He has exactly the same attributes as my boss does in terms of how much power my boss has in forcing me to align with his views. Historically, Linus has wielded that power and done so quite effectively. Pretending that he has not or cannot is not an argument in good faith.