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Comment by trollied | Hacker News Reader

Linus replied:

    How about you accept the fact that maybe the problem is you.

    You think you know better. But the current process works.

    It has problems, but problems are a fact of life.  There is no perfect.

    However, I will say that the social media brigading just makes me not
    want to have anything at all to do with your approach.

    Because if we have issues in the kernel development model, then social
    media sure as hell isn't the solution. The same way it sure as hell
    wasn't the solution to politics.

    Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no
    than\k you.

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Context

I struggle to follow the LKML through the web-interface. LORE seems to provide a better view:

1. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a869236a-1d59-4524-a86b-be08a15...

Maintainer of DMA wants to keep the code clean and not mixing languages[1]. And tries to avoid dangerous offers like "we will maintain it for you".[2]

2. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a869236a-1d59-4524-a86b-be08a15...

Somebody references social media posts.

3. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a869236a-1d59-4524-a86b-be08a15...

    If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas.

4. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a869236a-1d59-4524-a86b-be08a15...

Torvalds reaction.

My impression, while still struggling to follow the message flow:

I think social media and shaming are harmful and understand the reaction of Torvalds. The position of the DMA maintainer seems also to make sense for me, to keep code maintainable over decades it must remain in a nice and tidy state. That is the hard work.

PS: I want to avoid actual names of persons.

>Maintainer of DMA wants to keep the code clean and not mixing languages[1]. And tries to avoid dangerous offers like "we will maintain it for you".[2]

The Rust bindings are not in his tree. They do not touch his code. They are effectively no different than any other subsystem or driver which uses DMA. If he tried to veto some random driver that needed DMA from using DMA for no reason other than because he didn't want to have to deal with it if he changed the API in the future, that maintainer would be told to F-off because that's not his call.

Christoph is throwing NACKs around that he doesn't actually have the authority to NACK.

> The position of the DMA maintainer seems also to make sense for me, to keep code maintainable over decades it must remain in a nice and tidy state.

Perhaps so, but that discussion was two or three years ago. Stalling other contributors' work now is counterproductive, especially for changes that do not touch files maintained by them.

This does not justify any brigading behavior, though.

> no than\k you

Is that a typo or he indeed intended to escape that 'k'?

(Sorry, I know this doesn't add to the drama or what's going on there, which really doesn't interest me one way or the other, but this tiny bit had me curious)

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