Comment by agoodusername63
10 months ago
I'm usually very critical of how Torvolds treats the people around him and the culture he maintains but this is a rare case when I'm not really against Torvalds on this.
I've had to remove Hector's postings from my feeds because he just constantly bitches and complains about pretty much everything. He's capable, smart, and is doing more than anybody ever will for Apple hardware. But he desperately needs to Stop Posting. Without anybody he works with regularly to give him a reality check, I don't think he's going to change course.
I think Hector has some valid complaints about the contribution process to the kernel, I know. It fucking sucks ass and I've given up on trying. But screaming the way he does is counter productive to improving it
I feel the exact same. Marcan has done amazing work, and his random blog entries etc have saved me hours of debugging time in the past. But jeez, it is really painful to see him say absolute nonsense like "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas." - he has gotta Stop Posting and keep those kinds of thoughts away from his keyboard.
If Linus thinks that the social media angle is wrong, he should defuse situations before they become explosive because even if one of the devs didn't bring up the drama, there are dozens of news companies that would have printed up articles the second they found the discussion anyway.
Linus should have stepped in long before a maintainer blew their stack and started throwing out ultimatums. Once that happened, Linus could have still stopped everything with one sentence -- "Let me look into this.", but he did not.
Linus only got an opinion once things blew up on social media which proves that social media works which is the exact opposite of what he says he wants (and will just encourage more of the same).
> Linus only got an opinion once things blew up on social media which proves that social media works which is the exact opposite of what he claims.
That is really an apt point. You can't condition people one way, and tell them to do the opposite.
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Well... the maintainer also shouldn't blow their stack
You can certainly imagine ways an authority figure could have defused a situation of a maintainer blowing their stack, but your framing kinda absolves the maintainer of any accountability for their actions.
A team member who needs a lot of defusing is doing something wrong, and needs to learn how to defuse themselves.
What happens when Linus retires (or god forbid dies)? He can't defuse those situations forever, there needs to be some sort of process.
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Linus, as someone far removed from LKML, seems like he hates external visibility of what he wants to be effectively "internal" discussion more than anything else.
Not in the sense of "he wants the mailing lists private", but in the sense that "he doesn't want public complaint about private discussions", which feels like an evolution of "technical merit should win", as a position.
I dont think Linus gives a damn about any social media drama. Why should he care?
It just ("just") sounds like he's out of alignment with the kernel development process.
That shouldn't be too surprising - I mean, its an old project with a whole lot of technical baggage. Projects tend to slow down over time. And that is legitimately really frustrating when you want to shake things up or push for change. I would be rubbish as a linux kernel developer. I have the wrong temperament for it.
There's a reason why some tech companies interview for both technical skill and culture fit. Sounds like he's got the technical chops, but he's not a good fit for linux.
And when you're in a situation like that, your choices are essentially Voice or Exit. Voice is to do what he's tried to do - kick up a fuss about the problems to try and get them fixed. Thats a skill on its own - and it sounds like he's not been super effective at that. The other option is Exit. Which of course - sensibly, he's now done.
> he has gotta Stop Posting and keep those kinds of thoughts away from his keyboard.
Nah. Bottling this stuff up is a bad long term play. You end up getting bitter, cynical and resentful. I think we've all worked with people like that, and its miserable - both for the person and for their coworkers. I think its better to shoot your shot. Even if you miss - as he has here - you learn a lot about yourself and the world. And there's no shortage of interesting projects out there to work on. Pick something that matches your speed.
> some tech companies interview for both technical skill and culture fit. Sounds like he's got the technical chops, but he's not a good fit for linux.
You're right.
To fit with historical "linux culture" he needs to be much more aggressive and rude.
He needed to lead with something more inline with linux project leadership's examples, perhaps something like: Christoph " ... should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"
https://github.com/corollari/linusrants
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But this is just frustration coming out. I don’t think for a moment he expected shaming on social media to work.
But it did work. Linus actually got involved because of it...
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I've said this before, but the rust community really seems to attract the most toxic and drama-thumping types as their icons. I'm not really sure why such types are drawn to it.
This is profoundly silly.
First of all because we're talking about the kernel community here, which was incredibly toxic and dramatic long before Rust even existed. Linus has chilled out in the past few years but that legacy isn't entirely gone.
C++ drama has nearly come to fistfights at conferences, and the only reason that doesn't get talked about more is that the toxicity stays mostly on private (not public) mailing lists as a result of the more insular nature of that ecosystem. Nowadays you have a lot of people just quitting over things like the fact that a member of the standard committee was convicted on CSAM charges.
There are plenty of "C supremacists" in the tech influencer community and the maintainer mailing list of every distribution.
And streamers like PrimeTime that eagerly jump on every opportunity to shit on Rust and actively dump gasoline on every flareup of drama for ad revenue.
In general, programmers seem to love being elitist about languages and tools. Remember how everyone used to dump on PHP constantly?
Discussions on the internet often were dramatic. There are certainly also many "C supremacists", but I don't generally see C people coming to C++ or Rust projects and insisting that it should be rewritten in C because "C is better". I believe C is a better language myself and definitely much better than how it is currently perceived, but I do not mind if other people have a different opinion and do projects using other languages. While the mindset of many C++ and Rust proponents seems to be that "C has to die", so is inherently much more hostile. This makes it then sometimes difficult to ignore this completely.
I'm a Rust coder who also occasionally watches Prime, and I've never seen Prime casually pour gasoline on fires. Yes his whole business model is reacting to whatever content is hot right now, but he always does so in a considerate and non inflammatory manner.
He's not a fan of Rust for totally legitimate reasons.
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My experience with Rust and people who use Rust has actually been great.
There seems to be an entire second world of “Rust community” and Rust zealots online who are heavy on the drama, though. It really does feel like an alternate Rust universe.
Although when I think about it, several of my other interests and hobbies are exactly like this. Great in the real world, but as soon as you step into certain online spaces it’s drama and toxicity.
In this specific case, I think this is more about kernel drama than Rust drama.
I don't think that's true. I think the C guys told themselves that writing safe C code is just a matter of skill, but data shows that the amount of skill necessary to avoid writing unsafe C just isn't there. The average C developer isn't as competent as they claim.
You can lie to yourself and say that the same security problems exist in other languages, but that isn't true.
When I check the vulnerabilities marked as HIGH on a JVM based project, it's often banal stuff like a denial of service in Spring. The consequences of an attack are a few days of downtime until we patch the library, but the truth is that while downtime on our application might be profitable for a competitor, it's not profitable for a black hat hacker working alone. They can't blackmail us, because we can update the library without paying them to stop.
Meanwhile the average C vulnerability is usually some form of RCE that would let the hacker install ransomware.
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This.
From shaming everything else as either slow or unsafe to rewrite the universe, the Rust community makes it hard for new comers to consider the language by its merit.
But the good thing is, the hype has settled down and Rust has found its niche. It’s not tackling Go or Python anytime soon and competes in a different plane.
Zig is another great alternative for someone like me who never found Rust a pleasant language to work with.
This is not because of Rust, but C.
Any trending language will attract some not so great people who make their choice of a shiny language their whole personality. It's really a pity for rust to be in that position now, as those people are there for the feeling of superiority and will cause drama to get it
If rust ends up being mainstream successful, those people will move on to something else and start attacking rust for whatever they feel their new language is superior in
Someone should have hugged them when they were kids
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This is unfortunately my take with almost every interaction I had with the Rust community. Expressing any diverging opinion is enough to get ostracized.
Who are these icons?
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If you don't want to use C perhaps you shouldn't contribute to a 33 year old project written in C?
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No?
This was never about the languages primarily though. The C programmers here would react the same way towards any other language, be it Zig or Swift, its not Rust specific. They just don't want to partake the additional headache they'll have to deal with to for making the Linux kernel more accessible to languages other than C.
Despite than, Rust devs kept on pushing it after all that was clearly stated, just to make things more and more annoying. Maintaining a software as huge and widely used as the Linux kernel is a huge responsibility that can't be relied on words like "leave it on our shoulders", especially when real time, immediate response is demanded. Development of something like the Linux kernel in Rust will be left unmaintained eventually, unless millions of dollahs are constantly invested into maintaining it because Rust is not as simple as C and the need to avoid accidental copying, memory leaks and almost all memory related issues will add more work because you can't escape "unsafe" when dealing with low level hadrware and C, making the usage of the Rust programming language for Linux kernel development utterly pointless.
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Partially, but it takes two to tango.
There are softer ways to work with abrasive attitudes that can ultimately accomplish your goals. A key part of that is knowing which battles are worth fighting. Sometimes, it's better to let a suboptimal solution in to appease an ego.
I think Hector's change is the right one, but I also think with the dma maintainer being unwilling to budge the next move is to hack in a location with less resistance, potentially making more work and churn, but ultimately achieving the goal of rust in Linux.
Two people being abrasive to each other with code involved is a disaster.
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Like others have mentioned it was really the hypocrisy of this guy that made me side against him, not so much whether he was right or wrong.
He's a known, certified, card-carrying obnoxious rebel coming pretty close to violating a "Code of Conduct" himself pretty well every other day then his beef with Christoph about wanting to "mix languages" (C and Rust, of course) and Christoph said "I'm maintaining it and I'm not doing it, it's like a cancer" (I'm paraphrasing and he was notably not talking about Rust itself but "mixing" C and Rust) then Martin exploding and screaming that Christoph said "cancer" and that he had violated a Code of Conduct. Please.
A serious case of the pot calling the kettle black.
> then his beef with Christoph about wanting to "mix languages" (C and Rust, of course) and Christoph said "I'm maintaining it and I'm not doing it, it's like a cancer"
You don't even take time to figure out who's the commit author.
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This is the logic that generates generic corporate PR speak and a fear of being honest in organizational communication. It's not a more 'adult' world, it's just heavily sanitized. Calling something "a cancer in x" is a common analogy, we know what they mean.
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