Comment by dralley
10 months ago
The reasoning Linus himself gives for greenlighting Rust is, among other things, to avoid stagnation. So OP's description seems more apt than yours.
10 months ago
The reasoning Linus himself gives for greenlighting Rust is, among other things, to avoid stagnation. So OP's description seems more apt than yours.
Linus doesn't write much code anymore. The ones who are responsible and doing the heavy lifting and taking the heat when things break are the often unpaid maintainers. You can't say OP is more apt when he probably never done this work before.
I have to work with a "kernel a-hole". Sure it sucks but when there's some mutex bug in a chip driver, he's the one we can call and fix the problem and push the fix upstream even though he's already overworked. He's an a-hole but I respect his rules because he's the one suffering and pulling in the work and I don't.
Yes the kernel is stagnating (patches and email mailing list, line length limited to be compatible with old tty terminal, etc.) but when you're at the helm of a ship you don't just steer it near the nice looking island just because it looks pretty and there doesn't seem to have rocks.
The kernel is full of (a-)holes (both the code and the project), because the a-holes drive away the people who would help fix the holes.
Yes, it works, but there's a very real opportunity cost paid every day, month, release. It works until it doesn't. (Marcan crashed and burned out. But sure it works. And ... after all, since there's no real alternative we just pretend that it works. So as I was saying, it works! It's alive!)
Of course it's not easy to set boundaries, but the whole "patches are welcome" sets up false hope and masks the real incompetence in managing the kernel. (And of course is the focal point of the broader, very human tragedy of the Linux and FOSS ecosystem. insert obiligatory xkcd 2347 link here)
> The ones who are responsible and doing the heavy lifting and taking the heat when things break are the often unpaid maintainers.
Only 13.3% of all changesets are from people that are either unemployed or their job is unknown [1].
Even greg k-h said that most of the development is backed by big companies so the argument of 'poor unpaid maintainers' doesn't go too far.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1004998/