Comment by chippiewill
10 months ago
> Arguably his reprimand of Martin is a clear signal that he will never show Rust any favor
His reprimand is a clear signal that he won't tolerate brigading. Marcan was making a pretty blatant attempt at using social pressure to influence decisions.
And that is very fair since brigading is definitely not helping here. However, he should have also done the same to Hellwig for his unproductive behavior, yet he did nothing.
Oh and I got this quote for you:
> Linus Torvalds admonished the group that he did not want to talk about every subsystem supporting Rust at this time; getting support into some of them is sufficient for now. When Airlie asked what would happen when some subsystem blocks progress, Torvalds answered "that's my job".
Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/991062/
Do your job then, Linus!
People using Mastodon to promote pile-ons or brigading?
No, never! That's actually one reason I don't use Mastodon, it's extremely common. Isn't this the guy that blocked HackerNews links to the Asahi Linux homepage because the moderators wouldn't do his bidding?
>Isn't this the guy that blocked HackerNews links to the Asahi Linux homepage because the moderators wouldn't do his bidding?
Yup, that was Hector Martin (marcan) as well.
I don't know anything about him, but it seems like he has a pretty negative view of Reddit users as well:
> Added some clarifications in bold, because Reddit users having enough reading comprehension to understand what Christoph said and why it's exactly* what I described with other words is apparently a Lv.100 impossible challenge boss.*
https://web.archive.org/web/20250206022420/https://social.tr...
An Intel employee in a reply makes a extremely good point that I think everyone these days needs to follow
> And if you're wondering why you didn't realize this: It's impossible to change people by telling them they're wrong. What does tend to work is explaining different perspectives, so that they can figure it out themselves. And sometimes that's just way too subtle to ever register.
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[flagged]
I have paid special attention to these threads, and I have not seen this. And [flagged] comments don't count: any asshole can create an account and post any ol' bollocks. These posts are not "the community": these are posts "the community" has explicitly flagged and rejected.
So moving to effectively censor criticism that you can't control is justified?
Maybe the problem IS marcan, as Linus suggested.
If you do things that are in the public interest, people are going to have opinions about what you do and on a wide spectrum. If you can't handle that, you probably shouldn't be doing work that's so public and visible. Especially something like maintainer work that is inherently social.
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I'm not arguing that this is or isn't a problem but I think the statement "using social pressure to influence decisions" is so general that it could apply to just any discussion. That's kinda what discussion is.
Granted there are acceptable methods within that, and not acceptable.
Throwing up a call to arms in unrelated discussion venues with the purpose of drawing people to the original venue, or to harass the original participants in other venues, would count though.
i.e. no one would consider it acceptable for me to go on reddit and start ranting about a Hacker News username, link the thread and argument, and imply either implicitly or explicitly that they should go and join the argument.
Martin has a habit of polarizing and aggregating discussions too much. It is not healthy at all. Linus is definitely correct, especially since he has the history of doing the same and he has tried to fix it.
Imagine if the discussion would have started with an article like this. Patch probably would be merged already:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1006805/f75d238e25728afe/
Very doubtful. The maintainer was clear and nothing in there is sufficient to address his criticism: polyglot is unmaintainable and Rust people should write a whole new OS as a separate effort.
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> "using social pressure to influence decisions" is so general that it could apply to just any discussion
Not really. It's one thing to discuss these things directly in the proper channels, namely the mailing list, but it's another thing entirely to make childish, passive-aggressive posts on not-Twitter about how anyone who disagrees with your actions is trying to "sabotage the project" and trying to rally your followers to cancel them on the grounds of "Code of Conduct violations" (once again proving that "Codes of Conduct" are little more than tools to enable cancel culture).
He himself acknowledged the fact that what he did was childish and embarrassing by deleting his entire Mastodon account.
I honestly don't understand what the difference is between "brigading" and "complaining about a thing on mastodon". It's not uncommon to express frustration about something/someone associated with the kernel development process, what makes this particular instance "brigading"?
The difference is between posting "ugh, having a hard time with someone on a project, they're blocking this merge and I don't think it's for a good reason" and literally starting your post with "Behold," linking directly to a mailing list post, and misrepresenting the other person's objections as "sabotage."
I mean when what you're frustrated about is a leader actively sabotaging what you're working on...
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