Comment by rc00
10 months ago
In the face of Coccinelle for Rust still being unreliable, can you blame him or any maintainer? The codebase is too large to suggest that manual intervention every time something breaks is acceptable, especially when the same automated tool has been in place for C for nearly two decades. And worse yet, much of the code that is generated for Rust is in the form of macros which are quite possibly some of the most unmaintainable and difficult to parse parts of Rust.
You might not like the response for being strongly worded but it is indeed backed by a technical stance and not a political or social one as has been repeatedly suggested. Already overworked maintainers are not willing to sign up for additional maintenance to what has been a solved problem. Objectively, no one should disagree with that stance.
Yes, I do think endlessly relitigating project decisions that have been made is inappropriate.
It is not a technical stance. It is a project management one.
> Objectively, no one should disagree with that stance.
That is exactly why the maintenance burden is not his problem. He is under no obligation to take any additional work here.
> Yes, I do think endlessly relitigating project decisions that have been made is inappropriate.
Will you feel this way when the ruling eventually comes down that the Rust for Linux experiment has been declared a failure? Referring to what is currently an experiment as a decision is a rather bold misrepresentation of the current state. You want to present Rust in the kernel as a foregone conclusion when the reality couldn't be further from that.
> It is not a technical stance. It is a project management one.
Unstable infrastructure becoming a bottleneck is project management? Maybe a working implementation of Coccinelle for Rust should have been among the criteria before the experiment should have been allowed to proceed. That would have precluded the years of furor this has otherwise caused.
> That is exactly why the maintenance burden is not his problem. He is under no obligation to take any additional work here.
This highlights the crux of the issue and the reason your bias is clouding your view of the issue objectively. You are operating on the belief and trust of the small amount of Rust developers. Reality is proving otherwise time and time again.
> Will you feel this way when the ruling eventually comes down that the Rust for Linux experiment has been declared a failure?
Yes. What Linus says goes. That's how Linux works.
> Referring to what is currently an experiment as a decision is a rather bold misrepresentation of the current state.
It has been decided that having Rust in tree currently is acceptable. That is not a misrepresentation.
> Unstable infrastructure becoming a bottleneck is project management?
That is not the argument, it is a reason the argument is being made. The argument being made is "Linus should not have allowed Rust in the codebase." That there are technical consequences to project management decisions is not surprising, and they can be good or bad, but it's not the direct objection here, it's a reason why the objection is being made.
> That would have precluded the years of furor this has otherwise caused.
He himself said that he is unilaterally opposed, full stop, and nothing will change his mind. The state of Coccinelle wouldn't make any difference.
> You are operating on the belief and trust of the small amount of Rust developers.
I am taking Linus at his word.