Comment by llm_trw
10 months ago
It's not the maintainers job to make your project happen.
It's yours.
If you need someone to do free work but you can't convince them then you either get their boss to tell them to do it, you take over their job, or - the one thing that no one under 30 ever seems to do - fork and do the work yourself without anyone stopping you.
Reducing this to age is overly simplistic. When Linux was younger and simpler, it may've been easier to fork, but today it's a massive system with huge inertia behind it. Even if you are right in principle regarding your changes, it's extremely hard to overcome that inertia.
In the related submission on this topic [1], the author makes this argument in a lot more detail, that it's essentially impossible to make a Linux fork sustainable without massive investment that no one can realistically obtain.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036904
Noone's asking the maintainers to make the project happen.
It is the maintainers job to determine whether a project should be pursued at all.
If a maintainer says "yes I'd be happy to accept feature X", and then simply rejects all PRs implementing X without giving feedback then they're a bad maintainer!
That's essentially what's happening here due to the fact that the kernel maintainers have not come to a coherent decision regarding R4L.
>Noone's asking the maintainers to make the project happen.
If you're asking them to accept your code then yes, you' are asking them to support your project forever.
If you weren't sending them patches then they couldn't block you. Since you are they can.
Again, it's not their job to support this great idea you have that means they have to change how they've done everything for the last 30 years.
Yes but the parent has addressed this and you're just talking past them like they didn't comment. If the maintainers don't want it to happen then they need to come to an agreement that it won't happen. If they do want it to happen then they need to stop blocking it for non-technical reasons. If they can't actually decide then that's "no" or up to the project lead to enforce the decision at the risk of losing maintainers.
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> If you're asking them to accept your code then yes, you' are asking them to support your project forever.
> If you weren't sending them patches then they couldn't block you. Since you are they can.
One of the big turning points of this drama was a maintainer from a different area (who had been CCed on the threads, but was not the person the patch was being submitted to) blocking a patch that they weren't going to have to maintain.
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>Again, it's not their job to support this great idea you have that means they have to change how they've done everything for the last 30 years.
Then say that. A big part of the issue is that there has been mixed signals from the Linux maintainers about R4L. Linus seemed to have supported it, and others are trying to block it.
The maintainers should get on the same page about the inclusion of rustlang code, and communicate that.
They can absolutely block you if the code is not good enough. But if they don't want to accept the code at all, then just say from the outset "I'm not accepting rust code", rather than waste everyone's time.
I agree with you completely. If rust is so great why not make a new kernel with it and compete? or fork and start rewriting subsystems?
I do also understand the frustration when an open source project strings you along (me: can I join your club?), ask for this and that (them: sure if you pay your dues), ensuring your cover every "important" person's pet use case (them: and also buy us lunch), then publicly snark about the whole thing (them: this new guy know about no mustard on the lunch!) and kill your failing motivation (me: oh, sorry).
That's why the fork is so appealing. If it's good enough for long enough you get to join the club.
What I don't get is the complaints from the Rust people.
If Rust truly is zero overhead on the C side of things then they should be just able to fork Linux indefinitely without any worry about what upstream does. Just fast forward every change and you're golden.
Then they can write every driver they can imagine to their hearts' content.
The fact they aren't doing this tells me that the promise that this won't impact C people at all isn't much of one.
The problem is that they might want their drivers to actually work on people's existing Linux systems without having to force them to use a forked kernel.
It's like telling people who want JPEGXL in Firefox to "just" fork the browser, ignoring the massive extra effort that you actually have to convince everybody to use your fork instead of the original.
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