The key word there is immediately, they called upon Linus but also made the media drama at the exact same time. Call upon Linus, wait for his response, if you don’t get one after a decent chunk of time then go to social media.

It’s hard to know what line is would have done had there not been the drama that exploded before he got to the thread that ultimately upset him he may have stepped in to try and smooth things over he may not have but it was pretty much guaranteed he wouldn’t when it turned into a public event as his opinion on that has been clear for a long long time

While I do agree that there is some very problematic maintainers that are basically blocking progress just because they are old farts that don’t like change. I do also agree with Linus that immediately running to social media to drum up drama is not the correct solution to getting it fixed.

I am ultimately on the side of the rust maintainers here however there were definitely mistakes on both sides, I am not a fan of the trend over the past few years where anytime something doesn’t go your way you try and drum up as much drama on social media as possible. I am also not a fan of policing how people choose to word things, I don’t think there was anything wrong with the context that cancer was used. They were saying that the code would eventually grow uncontrollably and in a way that was unmanageable which is the literal definition of cancer, a cell that grows in an uncontrolled and unmanageable way.

Regardless of whether or not I agree with them that it would become a problem like that, I don’t see any problem with using the word like that.

There’s also some fault with torvald here, he needs to step up and either say that rust is okay or that it’s not because this wishy-washy game is bullshit and is not helping anybody. He originally accepted it into the kernel but has been letting random maintainers create roadblocks for it he either needs to tell them to back the fuck off and get over it or he needs to get rid of the notion that rust is accepted.

He mentioned turning a technical argument into drama and while I am not anywhere near as knowledgeable at these people I didn’t see much technical debate, I saw a maintainer that clearly said they just hated rust and we’re going to do everything they could to block it and not work with anyone on it. Which doesn’t sound like a very technical based argument to me, there were a couple concerns raised but they appeared to be addressed by multiple people quite thoroughly as there was both misunderstandings and even further potential compromises offered

I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I’ve ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it’s died horrifically… I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.

I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it’s update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.

The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.

I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch

If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ

I’ll never stop hating that debian is labeled stable. I’m fully aware that they are using the definition of stable that simply means not updating constantly but the problem is that people conflate that with stability as in unbreaking. Except it’s the exact opposite in my experience, I’ve had apt absolutely obliterate debian systems way too often. Vs pacman on arxh seems to be exceptionally good at avoiding that. Sure the updated package itself could potentially have a bug or cause a problem but I can’t think of any instance where the actual process of updating itself is what eviscerated the system like with apt and dpkg.

And even in the event of an update going catastrophically wrong to the point that the system is inoperable I can simply chroot in use a statically built binary pacman and in a oneliner command reinstall ALL native packages in one go which I’ve never had not fix a borked system from interrupted update or needing a rollback