Linus responds to Hellwig - "the pull request you objected to DID NOT TOUCH THE DMA LAYER AT ALL... if you as a maintainer feel that you control who or what can use your code, YOU ARE WRONG."
Linus responds to Hellwig - "the pull request you objected to DID NOT TOUCH THE DMA LAYER AT ALL... if you as a maintainer feel that you control who or what can use your code, YOU ARE WRONG."
Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA subsystem. Hellwig previously blocked rust bindings for DMA code, which in part resulted in Hector Martin from stepping down as a kernel maintainer and eventually Asahi Linux as a whole.
God damn... In the amount of time that people have talked about all of this drama all of these guys could have learned how to write Rust.
But seriously, Linus has been right at every turn here. He was right for telling Marcan that he handled it poorly by taking it to social media, and he's right here too about opting out of Rust.
I wish this was given a less provocative title. People who read the whole post will find that it's not all shouting, and Linus' stance seems pretty even-keeled.
But drama!
I wrote the initial title. I first saw this news on Reddit with a title like "Linus slams Hellwig..." and I really don't like titles like that.
So I opted for a direct quote that was able to fit in the title bar that gave a decent summary of the situation. I do agree it's still a bit provocative, but at least it's not me putting the spin on it.
This excerpt gives context and tone:
I respect you technically, and I like working with you.
And no, I am not looking for yes-men, and I like it when you call me out on my bullshit. I say some stupid things at times, there needs to be people who just stand up to me and tell me I'm full of shit.
But now I'm calling you out on YOURS.
Man, imagine if he had just come out and said this earlier before burning out a kernel contributor...
You’re implying that Linus is somehow responsible for burning out Marcan? I don’t think that’s a fair assessment.
Linus should have stepped in earlier. The R4L guys have been running against walls over and over (just look at how T'so, the "thin blue line" guy, spewed hate at that one conference), because individual developers think they can use their power to slow down the R4L project. They don't argue on a technical level. Linus, as the project lead, has to step in when this happens, otherwise the experiment can't work.
To add nuance to my comment: I think that Linus mismanaged the conflict, and that this was a significant and avoidable factor in Marcan getting burned out. For an example of how Linus could have approached this instead: he could have publicly criticized both Marcan and Hellwig at the same time, rather than first publicly criticizing Marcan and then only after Marcan left publicly criticizing Hellwig for his own behavior. This probably would have made Marcan feel less picked on and less likely to have been burnt out. (Or maybe not; I do not claim to deal in certainties.)
nonsense.
at what point did Linus frustrate the contributor? it was Hellwig all the way
The contributor's frustration with Linus started with Linus ignoring multiple explicit requests for his intervention. When the contributor was so frustrated at the lack of response from Linus that he had the audacity to talk about it off list (linking here because the original toot has been deleted), it was at that point that Linus finally chimed in to tell the contributor "Maybe the problem is you," implying that Hellwig's obstructionism was not a problem in his eyes and that the only issue was the contributor drawing public attention to it.
So when you change the C interfaces, the Rust people will have to deal with the fallout, and will have to fix the Rust bindings.
I hope this won't turn into a cat and mouse game.