> The Rust drama is an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds. Instead of decisively saying "no, never" or "yes, make it so," he has consistently equivocated on the Rust issue. Given the crisis of confidence among a sizeable (and very vocal) contingent of the Linux community, that decision has backfired horribly.
Efficiently collaborating on large distributed open source projects like Linux is as much social activity as technical. For people like Kent Overstreet or marcan and many before them this is apparently a hard thing to grasp and they have been failing badly at following the process, building consensus, earning respect and trust of people from other subsystems, that kind of things. To me it looks like that for Linux big part of R4L experiment is to specifically understand whether Rust people can convince key stakeholders that R4L is good idea and get their buy-in and that is why he doesn't attempt to force it. Also, what is he gonna do to the reluctant but key maintainers? Refuse to accept anything from them until each of them shows him a repo with all Rustlings exercises solved to ensure they are ready for Rust or what?
> And it's quite out of character for Linus not to have a blazingly clear opinion.
Linus tends to have clear opinions on things he is world class in. He is technically brilliant and very knowledgeable in most of the low level systems things but likely not in Rust, so it is understandable for him to just keep being open minded about it and let the chips fall where they may.
> As a pilot program, R4L should have graduated or ended a long time ago. After several years of active development, its status remains unclear.
Which is absolutely normal for the kernel. You can have a driver spending years in staging or RTLinux taking 20 years to get there. It is totally expected for such a disruptive change as introducing new (and quite complicated) programming language to take a few more years to reach maturity.
> Arguably his reprimand of Martin is a clear signal that he will never show Rust any favor, but he hasn't said anything explicitly.
Not it isn't.
> decision has backfired horribly
> place responsibility for the drama on Martin's shoulders
> Imagine how much time and energy (even just Martin's alone) could have been saved if Linus had just said "no, keep it downstream".
HN crowd and random JavaScript-kids on Reddit are only hotly debating this because the "drama" has the word "Rust" in the title. For Linux maintainers it is just another day at the office, nothing much to see here honestly.
> To me it looks like that for Linux big part of R4L experiment is to specifically understand whether Rust people can convince key stakeholders that R4L is good idea and get their buy-in and that is why he doesn't attempt to force it.
This is the entire point. This has been DONE. First its "lets see if you can build a good driver", now its "ew rust". The maintainer of the DMA subsystem is showing how they're actively trying to make sure Rust doesn't make it in. .
No, it is not the entire point. No one is really doubting whether you can write a driver in Rust, C++ or Swift. The whole experiment is whether you can slowly move in to existing mature kernel subsystems without being too disruptive.
If the minority maintainers scream every time they see other languages due to their insecurities, technical inability and stubbornness, and their overreactions get a pass, it is not the fault of Rust, C++ or Swift. The source of the disturbance is not the people who are making an effort to cause as little disturbance.
Blatant NIMBYism is the problem here and you cannot reduce it by accepting everything.
In general, upstreaming code to Linux involves interacting with difficult and sometimes outright hostile people. I've certainly had my share of both with much smaller changes. IMO pushing something like R4L requires very thick skin and almost infinite amount of patience. Bitching about that won't get you far, you need to be able to either work with or around those people.
This again gets back to the main point which you keep misrepresenting. This has nothing to do with a thick skin, this is a core subsystem maintainer outright saying they won't support R4L, which means its dead.
I'm not misrepresenting anything and R4L is not dead. In fact, two ways forward where suggested right in the LKLM email thread:
- Send the series directly to Linus since there is no code that Hellwig is maintainer of is actually being changed by it and let Linus decide whether to ignore Hellwig's nack. Linus may have done so before, but likely not after marcan's public meltdown.
- Copy/paste the code to every driver that will be using it. If it becomes useful, it will cause more pressure on Hellwig down the road because people will question why every change in code that is being wrapped by this is causing a fix in 10 different copies.
People here and on Reddit who are unfamiliar with the Linux development process but are attracted to the "drama" because it involves Rust somehow keep missing it.
> No, it is not the entire point. No one is really doubting whether you can write a driver in Rust, C++ or Swift. The whole experiment is whether you can slowly move in to existing mature kernel subsystems without being too disruptive.
Which Chris did doubt, as a way to gatekeep Rust (as you misrepresented, and which is clearly visible in the LKML thread).
regardless, back to the other stuff:
First point: Which is what was suggested as well in the LKML and still does not really solve the problem, which is not TECHNICAL but POLITICAL.
Second point: Obvious, and wasteful, and again is thus a political move which is the entire point of this entire saga. It isn't about drama, its about the political aspect of the kernel dev being tiring and wasteful.
> Which Chris did doubt, as a way to gatekeep Rust (as you misrepresented, and which is clearly visible in the LKML thread).
Can you provide the exact quote where Hellwig is suggesting that it is impossible to write a driver in Rust? No, you can't? So who exactly is misrepresenting here?
> regardless, back to the other stuff: First point: Which is what was suggested as well in the LKML and still does not really solve the problem, which is not TECHNICAL but POLITICAL. Second point: Obvious, and wasteful, and again is thus a political move which is the entire point of this entire saga. It isn't about drama, its about the political aspect of the kernel dev being tiring and wasteful.
You are shifting the goalpost from this making R4L "dead" to the way forward being "tiring and wasteful". It doesn't look like you are arguing in a good faith so I won't participate in the discussion with you anymore.
> just keep being open minded about it and let the chips fall where they may.
It's a failure of leadership to not intervene when discord threatens the group. He should weigh in, or make sure that someone else who has mutual trust weighs in.
In youth sports, something similar happens when referees fail to call fouls on rough play. Players naturally test the limits and then others recognize the lack of protection and retaliate until it gets really out of hand.
> It's a failure of leadership to not intervene when discord threatens the group. He should weigh in, or make sure that someone else who has mutual trust weighs in.
Nothing in that particular "drama" threatens Linux kernel maintainers as a group. Multiple solutions were proposed, like just sending the change directly to Linus bypassing Hellwig or copy/pasting the code to each individual driver for now. Marcan having public meltdown in that thread probably makes option 1 no-go though and doesn't improve R4L standing with the skeptical group of maintainers.
> In youth sports, something similar happens when referees fail to call fouls on rough play. Players naturally test the limits and then others recognize the lack of protection and retaliate until it gets really out of hand.
For better or worse the social contract in LKLM is not like what a lot of Rust people used to where you come in with furry avatar and pronouns in your profile, then cry for mommy to enforce CoC on first signs of conflict. Basically, extending your analogy, you don't come to an American football match expecting the referee to enforce basketball no-contact rules.
Efficiently collaborating on large distributed open source projects like Linux is as much social activity as technical. For people like Kent Overstreet or marcan and many before them this is apparently a hard thing to grasp and they have been failing badly at following the process, building consensus, earning respect and trust of people from other subsystems, that kind of things. To me it looks like that for Linux big part of R4L experiment is to specifically understand whether Rust people can convince key stakeholders that R4L is good idea and get their buy-in and that is why he doesn't attempt to force it. Also, what is he gonna do to the reluctant but key maintainers? Refuse to accept anything from them until each of them shows him a repo with all Rustlings exercises solved to ensure they are ready for Rust or what?
> And it's quite out of character for Linus not to have a blazingly clear opinion.
Linus tends to have clear opinions on things he is world class in. He is technically brilliant and very knowledgeable in most of the low level systems things but likely not in Rust, so it is understandable for him to just keep being open minded about it and let the chips fall where they may.
> As a pilot program, R4L should have graduated or ended a long time ago. After several years of active development, its status remains unclear.
Which is absolutely normal for the kernel. You can have a driver spending years in staging or RTLinux taking 20 years to get there. It is totally expected for such a disruptive change as introducing new (and quite complicated) programming language to take a few more years to reach maturity.
> Arguably his reprimand of Martin is a clear signal that he will never show Rust any favor, but he hasn't said anything explicitly.
Not it isn't.
> decision has backfired horribly
> place responsibility for the drama on Martin's shoulders
> Imagine how much time and energy (even just Martin's alone) could have been saved if Linus had just said "no, keep it downstream".
HN crowd and random JavaScript-kids on Reddit are only hotly debating this because the "drama" has the word "Rust" in the title. For Linux maintainers it is just another day at the office, nothing much to see here honestly.