Linus sets his foot down, against the gatekeeping attempts in the kernel
So let me be very clear: if you as a maintainer feel that you control who or what can use your code, YOU ARE WRONG.
I too put my feet down. Daily.
Some people pay for that you know, make sure to cash in!
Good on Linus, that's a very fair answer.
Yeah… I kinda wish he had provided it before all those devs quit, though.
Of course, he might have kept silent as a test to see if the project can remain healthy without his active stewardship, which makes sense for such a large and important project. I’m sure he’s unimpressed by the result.
Yeah, maybe just a good steward quality-testing the Bus Factors?
Too little, too late. As usual.
Well, would you look at that, after all forcing things to be discussed and bringing them to the news and social is actually a good thing to get more clear things when there's problems.
I don’t see how that follows. Linus wanted to see how the discussion went on the mailing list. I doubt he wanted nor appreciated the negative media and social media attention.
Exactly. Airing-out Hellwig's successful attempt to sabotage Rust efforts (and it was successful, given that at least two important maintainers have already resigned) was good, actually.
Unfortunately, it seems that Linus doesn't have the maturity to recognize that, and this cycle is likely to continue, barring something good and unforeseen happening.
I think it's a positive cycle. There's unfortunately a lot of emotion in kernel maintenance, and this attacks a huge part of it. Subsystem maintainers are maintainers, they don't own the project, they just make sure the code stays in a good state. In other words, they serve the users.
Good reply
What the fuck is with the person in the email chain implying not all drivers can be written in Rust? Rust does literally everything C can, nothing stopping you from using unsafe properly to achieve that.
A more serious answer would be that Rust can't be compiled to all targets. There is a lot of work to get Rust to compile with gcc though, which would help with this tremendously.
Gnu C has computed goto.
That's a performance optimisation which llvm is likely to do for you anyways, jump tables aren't exactly rocket science. Gazing into my crystal balls, might have to turn your enum variant Foo(u8) with possible values 0..15 into Foo0 through Foo15 (or maybe better Foo(EnumWith16Variants)) so that the compiler doesn't have to evaluate code to figure out that it doesn't need to NOP the rest of the jump range out, or bail out of generating a jump table, whatever it would do.
But is it used in the kernel?
Holy moly that is a man page of a roast. Linus has gotten extremely good at making himself clear while maintaining his temper just enough.
His argument is applicable to much of FLOSS: your code and contributions you have say over, but you can't complain about how people used your FLOSS code endpoints downstream. In exchange, any changes you make are the accessors' responsibility to keep up with.
Exactly. I loved his irate rants before, but this is much more respectful but just as effective. Keep it up Linus.
Not a follower of kernel development, but I agree with Linus. The latest drama is just full of unprofessional toxicity (from both sides).
Linus had said for years that he wants to see Rust in some form in the kernel. You might not like it, but sometimes you just have to disagree and commit.