Lvxferre [he/him]

you seem to think Hellwig and Rust4Linux should have the discussion in private

I did not say or even imply that.

and Hellwig should make the final decision in private

I did not say or even imply that.

You don’t know what others think. Stop lying / assuming that you do, and putting words into their mouths in the process.

If that’s correct good for him. Seriously.

The same people who might cheer you up, when you’re creating drama, are the ones who silently avoid you when it comes to working together. Because drama is only fun when it affects other people, not you.

And going by what Simona Vetter said in the mailing list, this is not the first time:

[Vetter] And this isn’t the first time or the second, by now it’s a pretty clear pattern over some years. And with the first I could explain why you [Hector Martin] react like that and you had my full understanding, but eventually that runs a bit thin as an excuse. Now I’m left with the unlikely explanation that you just like thundering in as the cavalry, fashionably late, maximally destructive, because it entertains the masses on fedi [Mastodon?] or reddit or wherever.

And being off social media will both decrease the odds Martin creates drama, and reduce the visibility of the drama he creates.

To add to what @[email protected] said, I’ll use an example.

Alice and Bob are organising a party. Alice claims that they should serve cheap wine. Bob argues for cheap wine plus beer. Alice is rather stubborn on saying “no, we’ll get drunkards this way”; it’s a poor argument but it’s still about the drinks.

Then Charlie pops up out of nowhere. Charlie is not part of the party organisation, but he’s still planning to attend the party, and he’s a biiiig fan of beer. He picks a megaphone and says “Hey! Alice is calling every beer drinker a drunkard! As a beer drinker, I feel deeply offended by that. If I was Bob I’d simply buy lotsa beer and ignore Alice.”

Then you get a bunch of people, who’ll never attend the party, eating popcorn while they watch the “Alice vs. Bob+Charlie” fight. Except that there’s no fight; Alice and Bob are arguing about something, and Charlie is creating drama. And a few popcorn eaters are bound to exert pressure towards Alice to give beer an OK sign, without even bothering to hear her side of the matter.

That is brigading: regardless of his “intentions” Charlie is bringing random people into the discussion to exert pressure towards one side of the dispute. Including muppets that think that anyone trying to get what Alice says must be “illiterate beer haters”.

Now replace Alice, Bob, Charlie with Hellwig, Rust4Linux devs, Martin. Replace cheap wine with C and beer with Rust. It’s the same deal.

Here’s the relevant kernel mailing list thread. There’s a lot of stuff going on before, mind you, but this part onwards is important.

If you didn’t read all of this (I don’t blame you), here’s how I am reading it:

• [Hector Martin] Rust devs, just submit the patch. Either Torvalds likes it or not. I assume that people against us are saboteurs. I know the future!
• [Simona Vetter] You can’t eat your cake and have it too; either call it quits or try to change things from the inside, not both. Also stop creating drama, it affects me, and I’ve seen you creating drama for years, just so social media platforms can have their popcorn.
• [Dave Arlie] Sima (Vetter) is right, stop creating drama. You are not helping [us? them?] this way.
• [Martin] I feel tired and this justifies my behaviour. I also got deeply offended with the word “cancer” being used to refer to the Rust4Linux project. The process is broken. If my brigading doesn’t work then say what else would.
• [Linus Torvalds] The process works dammit. Your brigading makes me not want to touch this shit. Patches matter, discussions matter, brigading doesn’t, you’re the problem here.

Martin’s toot (mentioned by Vetter was deleted, but still readable from an archive link.

Personally I think that Vetter, Arlie, Torvalds are being spot on. It’s relevant to note that, based on the mailing list plus this blog entry, Arlie is at the very least sympathetic towards the Rust4Linux project, if not part of it.

They were supposed to force those manufacturing plants to go to USA, but as the article shows it is not working:

[AsRock] “As for the 10% tariff applied to other products like GPU cards, we need some time to transfer the manufacturing to other countries.” [emphasis on the plural]

We already saw signs of this late last year, when PC Partner decided to relocate its headquarters from China to Singapore

And they likely won’t move into USA territory because USA might create some tax against the governments they import raw materials from, labour costs are high, and all that talk about expelling illegal immigrants will make labour costs even higher (lower labour supply = higher prices).

Didn’t the guy who decides on bringing new languages to the kernel(that’s not Christoph Hellwig) specifically said “do bring Rust to the kernel”?

Torvalds? Apparently, yes.

But…that’s exactly what’s happening

Well, then based on what you guys (specially you) are saying, it’s old man screaming at cloud. Torvalds and/or Kroah-Hartman* will likely need to intervene, since as you said they approved it; this drama Martin is doing in social media is pretty much pointless.

And if there’s a violation in the CoC it has zero to do with what he says (calling the R4L project “cancer”); it’s about obstructing other developers.

I also just catch something from the post I didn’t notice before:

As for how to move forward, if I were one of the Rust maintainers, I would just merge the patch

Martin isn’t even relevant! He’s just for the popcorn, like the rest of us! Free kernel development popcorn!

*speaking on Kroah-Hartman, do those changes proposed by the project affect the stable branch now?

I’m aware that you didn’t use the word “personal”; I did. (Sorry if what I said implied otherwise, it was my bad.) My point is that Martin is making a big deal like Hellwig had some bone to pick specifically against the R4L project and Rust, you know?

Based on the info that I currently have at hand I do think that the project will progress further, against Hellwig’s wish, and this will be a net benefit for the kernel. I just don’t see the big deal that people make of his opposition, he’s just being the old man screaming at cloud.

Hector Martin isn’t claiming that Hellwig’s crusade is against Rust, but against R4L.

Fair point.

“Don’t bring new languages into the kernel” is a crusade against R4L.

Still neither a crusade nor a personal one, unless proved contrariwise. It’s just that he’s prioritising some things and the R4L project is prioritising other things.

I am not a programmer. If you showed me C code and called it Rust, or vice versa, I would probably not be able to tell the difference. As such I’m not going to focus on technical merits or demerits, I’ll focus on what people say.

This is relevant:

• [Danilo Krummrich] What does “your code” mean? Duplicated in every driver?
• [Christoph Hellwig] Yes, interfaces to the DMA API should stay in readable C code and not in weird bindings so that it reminds greppable and maintainable.
• [DK] Rust drivers shouldn’t use C APIs directly, but rather use an abstraction of the corresponding C API.
• [CH] Don’t force me to deal with your shiny language of the day.
• [DK] Again, no one asks you to deal with or maintain this piece of Rust code.
• [CH] Maintaining multi-language projects is a pain I have no interest in dealing with. If you want to use something that’s not C, be that assembly or rust you write to C interfaces and deal with the impedence mismatch yourself as far as I’m concerned.
• [DK] This is exactly what we’re doing and proposing here, isn’t it? // We wrote a single piece of Rust code that abstracts the C API for all Rust drivers, which we offer to maintain ourselves. // What else are you asking for?
• [DK] Since there hasn’t been a reply so far, I assume that we’re good with maintaining the DMA Rust abstractions separately. // Hence, the next version of this patch series will have the corresponding maintainer entry.

What I take from this interaction is that Hellwig is not really picking a bone against Rust; his main concern is introducing new languages into the kernel and reducing its maintainability. And IMO Krummrich’s answer up to the second-to-last reply was really great - addressing the complain by highlighting that C developers won’t need to bother with that chunk of Rust code. (That last reply was awful, though.)

Based on this interaction I think that I agree with 5714 in this thread, that Hellwig might be overreaching.

So far, so good. What Hector Martin is doing there is something else. He is not selling the merits of the project Rust4Linux, he’s simply creating drama, by distorting Hellwig’s position from “don’t bring new languages into the kernel” into some sort of personal crusade against Rust.

And it’s rather “curious” how he brings up the CoC as some sort of rubber stick to bash people with, but omits which part of the CoC Hellwig would allegedly have violated.

[@raulinbonn] @marcan He does use the proper name shortly afterwards, but calling it “the another language” instead of just Rust sounds already quite loaded and belittling really. As if trying not to even acknowledge its proper name and existence.

Relevant tidbit: “the another language” sounds like a word-by-word translation from German “die andere Sprache”. It doesn’t really sound dismissive in German (Hellwig is clearly a German speaker.)

“As if trying not to even acknowledge its proper name and existence.” - okay… now the user is assuming = making shit up. It’s perfectly possible that Hellwig simply didn’t call it “Rust” to focus on the fact that his problem is not against Rust, but against a mixed language codebase - the complete opposite of what raulinbonn is assuming.

I mentioned this in another thread, but might as well develop it here: there’s no “new world order”, it’s “new USA order”. In other words I don’t think that this network state will be able to spread outside USA; it seems to rely too much on USA’s specificities (strong tech centres, and a rather lax gov that allows itself to be toppled).

And, even if the autocoup succeeds and the network state replaces the United-Statian government, the former will only get a fraction of the power of the later. External actors will intervene and grab their chunks of the pizza; and some power will be simply gone (e.g. international soft power - see Trump taunting Commonwealth, EU, some LatAm countries.)

I might be wrong, however. Don’t trust too much what I say.