Comment by caspper69
10 months ago
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.
Saying "I do not trust you, so I'm going to stonewall your entire work with which you could have built that trust" is not viable either.
Besides, none of this was said. Hellwig did not say "I do not trust you enough". He said "you are cancer, go away". First is harsh, but at least somewhat reasonable (in the sense that it _can be reasoned with_); second is not reasonable at all. Your interpretation is excessively charitable to an obvious bad-faith actor.
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No it does not require trust. If the RfL people don't do their job, well then Linux releases with the Rust parts marked broken and that's that.