Comment by dralley
10 months ago
>That is not what the maintainer said. The maintainer said that for Rust code in the area he is currently maintaining. I think the main issue was, the he was not accepting second maintainer to take care the Rust part on the same area.
The Rust code is not in the area he was currently maintaining. Christoph didn't even look at the patches before objecting to them. Once it was pointed out that they were not in his area, he rejected them anyway.
Note that, because they are not in his area, he does not actually have the authority to do this. He was CC'd in an advisory sense, it's not really his call to accept them or not, and as a longtime kernel maintainer he surely knows this.
The issue is it creates a downstream dependency on his code, even if it is 100% separate and separately maintained.
Once the wrapper is written, any breaking changes he makes in the DMA subsystem will, by their very nature, percolate downstream to the Rust wrapper and then to any Rust code that relies on it.
So basically from that point forth, he will always have to consider the ramifications of his changes on another group of developers, and deal with any backlash those may cause.
Is he being unreasonable? I tend to lean on the side of "yes," but I can certainly empathize with his point of view (not necessarily his approach, however).
He does not need to consider those ramifications because it is up to the rust for Linux people to fix the issues. He does not need to care about them at all.
They reiterated that in the thread too.
This works only if you trust the Rust people to do their job.
Obviously the maintainer does not trust the Rust people, but they also did nothing to gain his trust, but the opposite.
Just saying "Trust me, or else I will shame you" is not a viable strategy.
The default position of any code maintainer who sees some people coming and saying that they would maintain from now on some parts of the code and that there should be no worries about that, is to not trust them immediately, but only after enough time passes during which they demonstrate that they are really competent and not just claiming to be so.
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If that is true, why he was the one that was asked to review/ or why his opinion even matters here? The must be some sort of correlation to his code or this does not make sense at all..
He wasn't asked, he was CC'd on the patchset because it wraps his subsystem. If he was interested in doing a driveby review in good faith, or taking interest in what was going on, then he could have done so.