Comment by gpm

10 months ago

Put yourself in the shoes of the person submitting this patch. Is a "subtle implication" (and to be clear, it was a very subtle one if it was one at all) that a senior maintainers NAK on a patch is going to be ignored enough to make the whole situation not incredibly demoralizing?

Does it do much of anything to solve the fact they've publicly declared that they are going to do everything they can to stop the project, and that there's a history of them doing just that going on for years now?

Marcan's response clearly wasn't the most productive way to raise these issues, but the issues are there and are not being addressed.

To me the implication isn't subtle; the maintainer NACKs, the response from someone on the contributing team is "maybe we should involve @Linus or @Greg" and from that point on, you see Greg KH get involved to note what the proper procedure is and to ensure that it'll be followed. Hellwig is completely sidelined from that point onwards, minus some grumbling noise on his side.

Hellwig is a jerk, yes (probably crosses a few lines), but there's a procedure that sidelines him and his mention for this patch was a mere courtesy (since r4l maintains the wrappers and they're not even kept in his folder).

Marcan's insertion in the thread is extremely overblown and as someone in the thread notes, comes across more like a several hours late cavalry to appeal to his social feed. I have a slightly "nicer" interpretation of it than that (in that I don't think Marcan is that kind of person) since it reads like it's probably just the sort of rage best reserved for a private message to a friend, but he's making it everyone else's problem by threatening social media brigading (which is plain and simple: harassment and unlike Hellwig's rudeness, extremely easy to identify as something to push back on).