There's plenty of blame to go around here

Posted Feb 13, 2025 18:10 UTC (Thu) by dralley (subscriber, #143766)
In reply to: A lot of good stuff in there by dobbelj
Parent article: New leadership for Asahi Linux

I didn't think Marcan's Mastodon post was helpful to the situation, but I can't get on board with singling him out either.

There has been and continues to be a lot of bad behavior in kernel-land, and it was IMO the wrong move for leaders to step in and chastise him without actually addressing the issue at the root of this kerfuffle.

There's plenty of blame to go around here

Posted Feb 13, 2025 20:41 UTC (Thu) by ferringb (subscriber, #20752) [Link] (6 responses)

https://archive.is/uLiWX is the relevant post. And yep, someone did snapped and didn't do the perfect response of how to address it. Turns out devs are human; I'm sympathetic to his post, even if I recognize it's counterproductive (which he clearly realized, also).

As to the patch that kicked it off- https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250108122825.136021-3-abdiel.jan... . Even if you don't know rust, you should be able to read this.

Either introducing a centralized abstraction that drivers use, or (Hellwigs directive) having every driver try and muddle this out themselves... one of those is good engineering. One of those I lack an explanation for, especially when the person arguing it doesn't have to fricking maintain it and the R4L contract is "rust can be broken basically at will".

I really wish people would read the patches or pull stuff like above; it's easy to say "dudes pulling drama" until you start pulling the technical side and going "wait, wtf?".

There's plenty of blame to go around here

Posted Feb 14, 2025 8:49 UTC (Fri) by sima (subscriber, #160698) [Link] (5 responses)

This wasn't the post that spurred my reply. There was a separate one backhandedly calling out a bunch of kernel maintainers as religiously motivated sabotage, one of them working in the drm subsystem. That's why I stepped in, it impacted drm pretty clearly. Relevant archive.is link is this:

https://archive.is/rESxe

There's plenty of blame to go around here

Posted Feb 14, 2025 9:14 UTC (Fri) by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590) [Link] (2 responses)

Heh, that's an interpretation I have never ever thought about: I thought he was implying that his list of uncooperative maintainers contains people with names like Christian and Christopher.

I'm sorry, but calling it «religiously motivated» is applying optics from a different country, epoch or society, like calling someone out for slavery if they mention Slavic people.

There's plenty of blame to go around here

Posted Feb 14, 2025 14:55 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I'm sorry, but calling it «religiously motivated» is applying optics from a different country, epoch or society, like calling someone out for slavery if they mention Slavic people.

Don't confuse religion with Religion. Don't confuse "a way that works" with "the one true way". And kernel maintainers who believe in "The One True Way of Kernighan and Ritchie" are definitely Religious with a very big R.

On the other hand, there's probably a lot of them who believe in the Standard of C (not sure if it's C89, C11, C18, Gnu or Brian) "because it works for me". And they're religious with a small "r". If a Rustacean moved in next door, they wouldn't care.

I'm somewhat Religious about databases as other people will very definitely attest - Relational/SQL is the work of the devil :-) - not really, it does have SOME good points. The *maths* is great ... not much else, though.

Cheers,
Wol

There's plenty of blame to go around here

Posted Feb 14, 2025 15:23 UTC (Fri) by marcan (guest, #103032) [Link]

> I thought he was implying that his list of uncooperative maintainers contains people with names like Christian and Christopher.

That is exactly what I implied. I started collecting a (private, as I stated in the post, "not for public consumption") list of frustrating kernel maintainers, and was amused by the fact that the first 3 were names like that. Then I made an (admittedly tasteless) joke about it. I thought it was clear it was a joke (triple question marks...), and then edited in the /s when some people didn't get the intent.

There's plenty of blame to go around here

Posted Feb 14, 2025 10:09 UTC (Fri) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

> There was a separate one backhandedly calling out a bunch of kernel maintainers as religiously motivated sabotage, one of them working in the drm subsystem.

Really? You may or may not consider the general act of calling someone out on social-adjacent media as "conduct unbecoming" (that's not a question that I'm going to opine on in this message), but seriously considering this kind of thick sarcasm as some sort of religiously motivated hate speech is probably the most disingenuously uncharitable interpretation of someone's words I have *ever* seen.

There's plenty of blame to go around here

Posted Feb 14, 2025 13:45 UTC (Fri) by valderman (subscriber, #56479) [Link]

Even without the /s, the "oh no it's a christian conspiracy" bit is obviously a joke, and English is not even my first language. That you're seriously trying to use the post WITH the /s added as proof that Hector is out there persecuting christian kernel developers does not reflect well on you at all.

I don't think Hector's Mastodon posts were terribly constructive, but it's pretty clear that this is not the "toxic outsider baselessly attacks innocent kernel maintainers" situation you and some others are trying to make it iout to be.