Comment by duxup
10 months ago
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.
Well, Fuschia has been largely ported to Rust, I believe, so... that's coming.
> "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.