Comment by Longhanks
10 months ago
> This infighting is only going to hurt the kernel in the long run. Every time this "discussion" comes up, I walk away with the feeling that Linux kernel developers are unreasonably hostile and impossible to work with. It makes me wonder why new people would ever bother trying to contribute anything.
Well, this is your take, as you explicitly wrote "I walk away with the feeling". My take is: The kernel developers are the ones doing the actual work, which legitimates their opinion of doing things. If too many people aren't happy with the way the linux kernel is developed, they are free to fork it and develop in the way that they see fit.
Luckily, the kernel seems to be doing fine.
> The kernel developers are the ones doing the actual work, which legitimates their opinion of doing things.
Both sides of the argument are kernel developers here, though.
Well, one side just quit.
And that particular side was told by Linus Torvalds himself that his way of Social Media brigading is inappropriate for kernel development, and that the current process works.
I choose to believe Linus. His work on and guidance of the kernel used to and still does work pretty great.
No, the entirety of the Rust for Linux kernel development community didn't just quit. One guy quit. There are plenty of other kernel developers who are trying to push Rust 4 Linux forwards and make it viable for more kinds of drivers.
The person who quit was not the author of the patch, or a member of Rust for Linux.
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The kernel is doing fine today, but I don't think that's sustainable. The average age of the maintainers seems to be rising, and plenty of skilled people completely avoid kernel development explicitly because of the hostility and, frankly, assholish behavior that comes from the folks on these mailing lists.
Eventually a lot of these people are going to age out, retire, or otherwise move on. I do think there will be a crisis moment at some point in the future.
Also it's, y'know, written in C.
I used to know C. It was my first language, and I spent a fair bit of time in it, but that was before compilers started to treat undefined behaviour as an excuse to break reality.
Arguably I'm not smart enough, or disciplined enough, to write C. This may be the case, and therefore I have naturally focused on other languages. Rust, to no-one's surprise, is my current favorite. I've never contributed to the kernel — for more reasons than just the language — but the language would be reason enough on its own.
C programmers are getting rare...
Why are you projecting your own feelings onto others?
There’s plenty of people who write C, there’s plenty of newcomers who start writing C and if they’re willing to, they can find guidance, mentoring, and tooling to improve their skills. If that’s not the path you want to pursue, that’s fine. But C isn’t going anywhere soon and if you go to any university/college, there’s lots of C being taught and lots of people eager to learn.
they don't avoid it cause the hostility , they avoid it case we live in this high level era , where nobody knows where code runs or how it runs.
how forkable is the whole thing? I mean, it is several decades of code but...
It's not.
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> At least, it was exactly that environment that gave us the amazing product that has changed the world.
You need some extraordinary evidence to claim things like that.
To stretch things a bit, it's like saying, while male dominated the field of engineering in the 60s (and still do), it was exactly that kind of environment that made it possible for humans to get to the moon. Can you actually prove it? Really?
It's hard for me to imagine using git will slow down kernel development compared to sending patches in emails.
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