Comment by vessenes
10 months ago
First of all, yay Asahi — one of the great modern hacking / hacker stories in my opinion.
Second, what’s the drama? I read the blog, and I’m guessing that on top of being burned out, which sucks, Marcan didn’t like a kernel developer using the phrase “we are the thin blue line” implies he’s politically liberal, in the US sense. He then says he may have been toxic on Mastodon, which might have got him secretly canceled?
All that said, I found his assessment of downstream v. upstream economics (if you can’t successfully upstream you’re doomed to rebase off a massive patch list) pretty interesting. I think the way it is now is the only way that’s good for users — if downstream forks could somehow maintain viability longer term, we would be splitting, e.g. security budgets, performance budgets, etc. I get that it sucks for a group working to upstream, and I am in no way shocked to hear personal politics plays some role in success upstreaming — open source is largely a personal / social capital economy - I guess all that said, hopefully the new Asahi maintainers can work well across what seems like ideology bounds. Maybe?
My understanding from afar is that a Rust dev wanted to interact with C code in a way that the C maintainer didn't like. This led to the C dev saying that while he likes Rust, he believes multi-language codebases are cancer and would stonewall all Rust code that touches his code.
Marcan watched it unfold on the mailing list wanted Linus to step in and force the C dev to play nice. Since nothing happened, he went to social media and lashed out as a last resort. That's when Linus finally chimed in and pretty much said "you might be right, but this isn't the way to handle things".
> My understanding from afar is that a Rust dev wanted to interact with C code in a way that the C maintainer didn't like.
He didn't want any Rust code at all touching his turf. He outright NACKed without any technical reason and refused any negotiations with the Rust team that any Rust build fails due to C code breaking changes would be their entire responsibility.
> This led to the C dev saying that while he likes Rust, he believes multi-language codebases are cancer and would stonewall all Rust code that touches his code.
I believe that was an attempt of damage control to save face and he actually meant to call Rust "cancer".
>Marcan didn’t like a kernel developer using the phrase “we are the thin blue line” implies he’s politically liberal, in the US sense.
From what I saw on urbandictionary, it seems more likely to be something cops in high crime areas in the UK say.
Anywhere really, it's just the phrase 'there's a thin [or fine] line between...' modified to say the police are that line, between lawful order & disorder.
Apparently it's political in the US, I have no idea, but as I understand it the maintainer just means 'I am here reviewing the change to keep the kernel in good order'.
The maintainer might mean that, but words have meaning. That particular phrase is overly charged and carries a specific connotation surrounding the idea that police are the sole line keeping society in shape.
It’s a poor choice of words for such (relatively) public communication.
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Thank you for pointing out the blue line comment, I didn’t grasp it and continued. If you are right I’m saddened to see this type of politics being played in the kernel development. Especially since the Russian maintainer incident.