Despite his position as "Benevolent dictator for life", Linus doesn't really have the chutzpah to stand up and say "we're doing it this way"[1], so these sorts of questions try to get resolved through petty bickering and namecalling instead (which is the opposite of consensus-building and healthy debate and just makes people more entrenched and unwilling to compromise).
[1] - He was already ousted from the project once, I don't think he wants to try it again.
That question is also not what is at the heart of this conflict. It’s someone that categorically rejects the experiment, even though the project has decided to give it a try. It’s entirely social and not technical.
The actual question is if that overhead is worth it and it seems that there is no clear answer on that question despite many Rust-force claiming otherwise. I can totally understand the position of kernel maintainers.
What I cannot understand is the following shameful, almost unbelievable, act from Hector Martin
> If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas.
If there's a single most reason why Rust-in-Linux will fail it is going to be because of the immaturity and entitlement of individuals in Rust community.
He clearly expressed a technical opinion based on his own beliefs, and that’s all. There was no reasoning.
He did not even acknowledge the fact that it is going to be maintained separately from the actual generic kernel code (rust/kernel/dma vs kernel/dma).
Anyone can easily formulate a sentence that seems coherent and correct, but it can be proven completely false in 15 seconds with actual data.
IOW: just because someone calls it a technical argument it doesn’t make it one.
This is a matter of opinion - specifically, the opinion of a single person.
> If there's a single most reason why Rust-in-Linux will fail it is going to be because of the immaturity and entitlement of individuals in Rust community.
Indeed there was immaturity from several individuals.
One question: if you act immaturely towards someone and they react immaturely, who's fault is it? The person who reacted or you?
I do not believe there is a widespread issue of entitlement: if you follow the discussions on the ML and observe how the R4L project has progressed so far, the only "entitlement" that individuals in the R4L project may seem to have in common is the desire to be treated with respect and for discussions to focus on technical arguments.
For me, this is the bare minimum to be expected.
"The common ground is that I have absolutely no interest in helping to spread a multi-language code base. I absolutely support using Rust in new codebase, but I do not at all in Linux."
When someone says
> You might not like my answer, but I will do everything I can do to stop this.
Against the decision that the project made, that is very straightforwardly sabotage.
> All the hype and enthusiasm related to Rust is that you can just write something easily in C instead of Rust (or rewrite) and then all problems related to safety are solved.
You cannot accuse others of being hyperbolic and then be so yourself. No serious person claims that it’s easy or that it solves all issues.
I don’t really even want to engage with this rest of this post, honestly it says more about you than about Rust.
Where? And in light of the ongoing infighting and lack of clear parameters, do you think that was truly sufficient?
It was sufficient, but that doesn’t prevent people from acting in bad faith. Which is what is happening here.
I understand their exhaustion, but aiming their frustrations at Linus for having an entirely level-headed response shows that they can't read the room. This is the Linux project, you're going to have problems merging enormous codebases that reverse-engineer poorly understood hardware. I support Rust in the Linux kernel, but this is the kind of envoy that will spoil the effort.
I agree that Linus's response wasn't over the top, but Hector didn't quit because of that one email. Heck, as far as I know he wasn't even involved in writing the patch in question. The Asahi folks have had a number of issues dealing with other maintainers for at least the past couple of years. This is a "the straw that broke the camel's back" situation.
