I tried reading the history here. I confess the emails signed "on behalf of the committee" hit with a bad taste.
In particular, if the goal is to promote more discussion and openness between contributors, having a "committee" involved feels very counter productive. As does demanding an apology.
By all means, empower folks to call others out as rude. Publicly call out what you see as transgressions. But don't do so with a shield of, "I'm speaking for the committee."
I've been an on and off contributor of FLOSS software for a long time. Sometimes I sent some unfinished patches and got responses like ' I don't think you know what you're doing' and 'turn on brain'.
At the time I considered those developers were right and didn't complain. It made more careful before sending patches and commenting. But it also affected my willing to contribute with the project. I also consider that, although those devs were right, they could have expressed themselves more cordially. I don't think being that rude improves anything.
I do support the CoC committee decision and hope more projects had one.
What he said wasn't even nearly as bad as what I've seen Linus say in other threads over the years. Is / was Linus Torvalds ever subject to a "tribunal" like Kent just was?
In the end, it's the users that end up suffering. The guy (Hocko) kept making mistake after mistake and Kent struggled to get him to do anything remotely net positive with regard to the issues in that original thread.
I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.
And I would say on a whole his behavior after 2018 has been less rude although he is still quite frank when necessary. I think it’s a positive change.
I think Linus’s message from 2018 is good perspective here: when someone behaves in a way that harms the mission of the kernel it’s better to try to change that behavior at the expensive of that person’s contributions for a limited time, rather than having the bad behavior negatively impact all other contributors forever.
The current CoC came out from a particularly bad incident with Linus, which he signed off on at the same time as he went into therapy and started working on himself. There is a remarkable difference in the before and after.
> I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.
They absolutely can "fire" them, by making a decision not to accept any contribution from them.
Around the time the CoC was being established, Linus went to therapy. If I recall correctly, some people had spoke to him about his behaviors and he decided to do something about it. I think it was done in private so it's unclear how much of it was pressure vs his own decision. His tone has become much less aggressive since.
Linus did take a break to work on his anger issues and he has been very noticeably improved these last 6 years. While I don't think it was due to a tribunal, but I think enough other developers told him in private to work on it.
Came a bit too late for me; I spent some time fixing bugs in an ISDN driver in my teens, but Linus’ reputation prevented me from ever trying to upstream it.
My reading of it is that they both were being jerks. In particular, the whole "I supported my argument with references, but it's YOUR job to locate those arguments" never sits well with me.
Reminds me a bit of this time I had FINALLY gotten someone to volunteer to help out with maintenance, and his first action was met with someone being a real jerk. I called them out on it and they started attacking me. I never replied, but I did get an "appology" from them: [paraphrased] "I'm sooo sorry... That I sent that from my work address. Please don't get me fired, I need this job."
I really want to migrate my zfs pool to bcachefs so I can finally follow the latest version of fedora from day one, but this crap is making me doubt it’s a good move…
Regardless of everything else, most people should not be using bcachefs yet. Kent has even stated that unless you're okay not being able to access your data for chunks of time while bugs are being fixed, you shouldn't be using it. The conventional wisdom would be to wait 10 years after a new filesystem is introduced for it to stabilize before switching, so we're looking at summer next year at the earliest.
Apart from that, there are (or were, last I tried it six months ago) some performance bugs in the code.
Nothing that completely breaks it, but I found at the time that the high variance on read requests for Samsung 970 series NVMe causes the filesystem to also dispatch reads of cached data to the HDDs, even when it’s fully cached.
Which predictably increases latency a lot.
Really I should make another stab at fixing that, but the whole driver is C, and I’m not good at writing flawless C. Combine that with the problem actually being hard…
(“Always read from SSD” isn’t a valid solution here.)
No, they had the option of having a real conversation in private about what we could do to improve the overall situation.
Instead what I got was "It'd be a real shame if you're no longer around", and other equally dismissive behavior, and considering this was a situation in which a maintainer was pushing for something that would likely have led to security vulnerabilities and was being dismissive of criticism I didn't feel that was something we could let slide.
Good code is not written in a democratic way. Seems like Hocko was wearing Kent down with his arguments on what was a very bad idea in the first place.
I agree the last sentence by Kent was not needed, but I can totally understand his frustration.
I think it’s a loss for the users at the end on the day.
Kent is only prevented to merge for a version and mostly because he refused to actually apologise and kind of dig his heels.
Reading his comment on LWN, he seems really really tired. A mandatory break doesn’t look like the worst thing which would happen to him. I don’t think he is a bad person.
In particular, if the goal is to promote more discussion and openness between contributors, having a "committee" involved feels very counter productive. As does demanding an apology.
By all means, empower folks to call others out as rude. Publicly call out what you see as transgressions. But don't do so with a shield of, "I'm speaking for the committee."
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