Lvxferre [he/him]

I know that URL.

At those times I swear, I have a knack for avoiding problems before they appear.

Some years ago I migrated from Ubuntu to Debian. It was due to something silly, like defaults. Then I got pissed with Debian Stable, went to Testing, got pissed again… and for some reason instead of going back to Ubuntu I gave Mint a try.

Then people started talking about snaps a lot, and I gave them a try in Mint. This was in a potato computer so I could clearly notice how slow they were to start. Nope.

Then Ubuntu started forcing them every where, but by then I could simply say “Not My Problem®”. Mint maintainers are clearly against snaps, and I’m happy with it.

Glad to see Õunapuu also found a way to handle the problem by changing distros. I’m too deep into the APT rabbit hole to get used to Fedora, but it seems like a good choice regardless.

you seem to think Hellwig and Rust4Linux should have the discussion in private

I did not say or even imply that.

and Hellwig should make the final decision in private

I did not say or even imply that.

You don’t know what others think. Stop lying / assuming that you do, and putting words into their mouths in the process.

If that’s correct good for him. Seriously.

The same people who might cheer you up, when you’re creating drama, are the ones who silently avoid you when it comes to working together. Because drama is only fun when it affects other people, not you.

And going by what Simona Vetter said in the mailing list, this is not the first time:

[Vetter] And this isn’t the first time or the second, by now it’s a pretty clear pattern over some years. And with the first I could explain why you [Hector Martin] react like that and you had my full understanding, but eventually that runs a bit thin as an excuse. Now I’m left with the unlikely explanation that you just like thundering in as the cavalry, fashionably late, maximally destructive, because it entertains the masses on fedi [Mastodon?] or reddit or wherever.

And being off social media will both decrease the odds Martin creates drama, and reduce the visibility of the drama he creates.

To add to what @chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world said, I’ll use an example.

Alice and Bob are organising a party. Alice claims that they should serve cheap wine. Bob argues for cheap wine plus beer. Alice is rather stubborn on saying “no, we’ll get drunkards this way”; it’s a poor argument but it’s still about the drinks.

Then Charlie pops up out of nowhere. Charlie is not part of the party organisation, but he’s still planning to attend the party, and he’s a biiiig fan of beer. He picks a megaphone and says “Hey! Alice is calling every beer drinker a drunkard! As a beer drinker, I feel deeply offended by that. If I was Bob I’d simply buy lotsa beer and ignore Alice.”

Then you get a bunch of people, who’ll never attend the party, eating popcorn while they watch the “Alice vs. Bob+Charlie” fight. Except that there’s no fight; Alice and Bob are arguing about something, and Charlie is creating drama. And a few popcorn eaters are bound to exert pressure towards Alice to give beer an OK sign, without even bothering to hear her side of the matter.

That is brigading: regardless of his “intentions” Charlie is bringing random people into the discussion to exert pressure towards one side of the dispute. Including muppets that think that anyone trying to get what Alice says must be “illiterate beer haters”.

Now replace Alice, Bob, Charlie with Hellwig, Rust4Linux devs, Martin. Replace cheap wine with C and beer with Rust. It’s the same deal.

Here’s the relevant kernel mailing list thread. There’s a lot of stuff going on before, mind you, but this part onwards is important.

If you didn’t read all of this (I don’t blame you), here’s how I am reading it:

• [Hector Martin] Rust devs, just submit the patch. Either Torvalds likes it or not. I assume that people against us are saboteurs. I know the future!
• [Simona Vetter] You can’t eat your cake and have it too; either call it quits or try to change things from the inside, not both. Also stop creating drama, it affects me, and I’ve seen you creating drama for years, just so social media platforms can have their popcorn.
• [Dave Arlie] Sima (Vetter) is right, stop creating drama. You are not helping [us? them?] this way.
• [Martin] I feel tired and this justifies my behaviour. I also got deeply offended with the word “cancer” being used to refer to the Rust4Linux project. The process is broken. If my brigading doesn’t work then say what else would.
• [Linus Torvalds] The process works dammit. Your brigading makes me not want to touch this shit. Patches matter, discussions matter, brigading doesn’t, you’re the problem here.

Martin’s toot (mentioned by Vetter was deleted, but still readable from an archive link.

Personally I think that Vetter, Arlie, Torvalds are being spot on. It’s relevant to note that, based on the mailing list plus this blog entry, Arlie is at the very least sympathetic towards the Rust4Linux project, if not part of it.

TL;DR: stop assuming.

Your position is entirely reasonable and an excellent example of how ignoring technical details leads to failures of technical leadership.

That’s why I didn’t address the technical merits, like a leader should. (Nor I am a leader; I’m a random with a chimp avatar.) I focused on the “popcorn” / drama.

[ Rust info dump ]

Cool beans.

What I’m saying is that Martin should be sharing this info, instead of creating drama.

Because ultimately the goal of both sides is the same, a better kernel. It’s just that one prioritises consistency (for the sake of maintainability) and another the advantages of Rust over C, and those priorities are in conflict.

And if Hellwig cannot be convinced, the leadership can, and should.

Also, finally, I have to dock [to reduce wage from; to deduct points from] you for reading comprehension. Martin was quite clear: calling Rust a “cancer” […] was, to them, a violation of the Code.

I’m saying that Martin has the moral obligation to make his complain as precise as possible: “The CoC says [insert excerpt] and Hellwig is going against that”. Telling people to RTFCoC is the opposite of that. Is this clear now?

Also, this either is or isn’t a violation of the CoC. There’s no space for “to them”, rule violations should be handled as objectively as reasonably possible. (From a quick check, it doesn’t seem to be one. I might be wrong however.)

a cute pun given Rust’s crab mascot, or a dehumanizing slur, who knows

There’s no room for either reading, given that

• Hellwig shows no interest on Rust, so references to the mascot are out-of-place
• A project is not a human being.

The immediate reading is as an analogy; cancer is known for spreading itself through tendrils, taking huge amounts of resources. If that reading is correct, Hellwig is criticising the project for not being well contained, and invading spaces that Hellwig believes that it shouldn’t.

Another possible reading is “cancer” as “shit”, “crap”, or “rubbish”; a simple negative word.

were it a slur, it would violate the prohibition on “insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks.”

And were my cat a chicken, she would lay eggs. However my cat is not a chicken and “cancer” is not a slur.

I am not a programmer. If you showed me C code and called it Rust, or vice versa, I would probably not be able to tell the difference. As such I’m not going to focus on technical merits or demerits, I’ll focus on what people say.

This is relevant:

• [Danilo Krummrich] What does “your code” mean? Duplicated in every driver?
• [Christoph Hellwig] Yes, interfaces to the DMA API should stay in readable C code and not in weird bindings so that it reminds greppable and maintainable.
• [DK] Rust drivers shouldn’t use C APIs directly, but rather use an abstraction of the corresponding C API.
• [CH] Don’t force me to deal with your shiny language of the day.
• [DK] Again, no one asks you to deal with or maintain this piece of Rust code.
• [CH] Maintaining multi-language projects is a pain I have no interest in dealing with. If you want to use something that’s not C, be that assembly or rust you write to C interfaces and deal with the impedence mismatch yourself as far as I’m concerned.
• [DK] This is exactly what we’re doing and proposing here, isn’t it? // We wrote a single piece of Rust code that abstracts the C API for all Rust drivers, which we offer to maintain ourselves. // What else are you asking for?
• [DK] Since there hasn’t been a reply so far, I assume that we’re good with maintaining the DMA Rust abstractions separately. // Hence, the next version of this patch series will have the corresponding maintainer entry.

What I take from this interaction is that Hellwig is not really picking a bone against Rust; his main concern is introducing new languages into the kernel and reducing its maintainability. And IMO Krummrich’s answer up to the second-to-last reply was really great - addressing the complain by highlighting that C developers won’t need to bother with that chunk of Rust code. (That last reply was awful, though.)

Based on this interaction I think that I agree with 5714 in this thread, that Hellwig might be overreaching.

So far, so good. What Hector Martin is doing there is something else. He is not selling the merits of the project Rust4Linux, he’s simply creating drama, by distorting Hellwig’s position from “don’t bring new languages into the kernel” into some sort of personal crusade against Rust.

And it’s rather “curious” how he brings up the CoC as some sort of rubber stick to bash people with, but omits which part of the CoC Hellwig would allegedly have violated.

[@raulinbonn] @marcan He does use the proper name shortly afterwards, but calling it “the another language” instead of just Rust sounds already quite loaded and belittling really. As if trying not to even acknowledge its proper name and existence.

Relevant tidbit: “the another language” sounds like a word-by-word translation from German “die andere Sprache”. It doesn’t really sound dismissive in German (Hellwig is clearly a German speaker.)

“As if trying not to even acknowledge its proper name and existence.” - okay… now the user is assuming = making shit up. It’s perfectly possible that Hellwig simply didn’t call it “Rust” to focus on the fact that his problem is not against Rust, but against a mixed language codebase - the complete opposite of what raulinbonn is assuming.

Childish? Kinda. Insane? No.

There are three relevant things to say about hexbear.

1. It is not a serious instance. Or at least not completely serious; they’re mostly there for memes, funposting, “I know that feel” etc.

So they’re less like the meeting room of a communist party than like the bar where those communists hang out and drink beer, after the meeting is over.

I feel like this is often misinterpreted, as HB users say something that is mostly a taunt and others interpret as actual argumentation. And it also tends to attract younger users, who… well, behave like young people?

2. Even if not a serious instance, they’re serious about their views. Your typical HB user is communist, antifa, vegan, anti-cop, and interprets things in a very specific way. They’re rather transparent about it.

And, because of #1, they aren’t really willing to spend their time entertaining anyone’s counterpoints. It’ll be interpreted as sealioning or similar.

3. Hexbear was already its own thing before federation. As such it developed social norms that often conflict with the norms typically found in the rest of the Threadiverse (Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed etc.)

For example, even if Lemmy as a whole is prone to intrusive political discussions, HB users tend to do it far more. Because they’re used to an environment where this is typically taken as OK.

When it comes to dealing with HB users here, my advice is the exact same as dealing with other users:

• if you don’t like what someone is saying (because it’s idiotic, obstrusive, or whatever), block the person for some peace of mind.
• if you’re consistently uninterested on the content coming from an instance, block the instance.