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Being an outsider to this whole scene, the whole thread reads very differently to me. Kent seems very patient in explaining his position (and frustrations aris

Being an outsider to this whole scene, the whole thread reads very differently to me. Kent seems very patient in explaining his position (and frustrations arising from other people introducing bugs to his code) and the kernel & debian folks are performing a smearing campaign instead of replying to what I see are genuine problems in the process. As an example, the quotes that are referenced by user paravoid are, imho, taken out of context (judging by reading the provided links). There probably is a lot more history to it, but judging from that thread it's not Kent who looks like a bad guy.

johnny22 1y ago
it's waaay simpler than that. Some projects have established rules, and kent doesn't want to follow them. It doesn't matter how nice (or not) he is.
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  I actually like the idea of the maintainer going out of his way to make sure that my filesystem is safe to use. Even if it goes against the established rules. And I'm saying that as someone who actually likes both Linux and Debian.
  - rwmj 1y ago
    It's a strawman to imagine that Debian doesn't have a way to ensure filesystems are safe and to respond to critical bugs that might cause data corruption. It's just that you have to follow their rules to do it. (And broadly the same rules apply to the other big distros as well).
    - rcxdude 1y ago
      And the rules demonstrably create situations where it's easy to introduce bugs or hard to fix them, because they prioritise stability and a consistent set of package versions over the version that the upstream developer has tested. Followed blindly (and without putting in the effort to test to the same level of rigor as upstream), this causes problems, and it's right to point those out. Debian's ways would involve the package maintainer putting in a lot more effort to marry their rules with a package that actually worked, and they were not up for that. (Debian's rules aren't worthless, it's part of how they can make something that's pretty suitable for 'boring infrastructure' systems because they can keep a system with a known and stable set of behavior up to date with critical security fixes for a long time, but boy do they result in some dumb situations sometimes)
arp242 1y ago
Kent brings up Debian himself, unprompted. This is one of the problems: Kent is frequently unable to accept that things don't go his way. He will keep bringing it up again and again and he just grinds people down with it. If you see just one bit of it then it may seem somewhat reasonable, but it's really not because this is the umpteenth time this exact discussion is happening and it's groundhog day once again. This is a major reason why people burn out on Kent. You can't just have a disagreement/conflict and resolve it. Everything is a discussion with Kent. He can't just shrug and say "well, I think that's a bit silly, but okay, I can work with it, I guess". The options are 1) Kent gets his way, or 2) he will keep pushing it (not infrequently ignoring previous compromises, restarting the discussion from square one). Here too, the Debian people have this entire discussion (again) forced upon them by Kent's comments in a way that's just completely unnecessary and does nothing to resolve anything. Even as an interested onlooker who is otherwise uninvolved and generally more willing to accept difficult behaviour than most people, I've rather soured on Kent over time.
- koverstreet 1y ago
  You do realize that data integrity issues are not "live and let live" type things, right? And there's a real connection to the issue that sparked all this drama in the kernel and the Debian drama: critical system components (the kernel, the filesystem, and others) absolutely need to be able to get bugfixes in a timely manner. That's not optional. With Debian, we had a package maintainer who decided that unbundling Rust dependencies was more important than getting out updates, and then we couldn't get a bugfix out for mount option handling. This was a non-issue for every other distro with working processes because the bug was fixed in a few days, but a lot of Debian users weren't able to mount in degraded mode and lost access to their filesystems. In the kernel drama, Linus threw a fit over a repair code to recover from a serious bug and make sure users didn't lose data, and he's repeatedly picked fights over bugfixes (and even called pushing for getting bugfixes out "whining" in the past). There are a lot of issues that there can be give and take on, but getting fixes out in a timely manner is just part of the baseline set of expectations for any serious project.
  - arp242 1y ago
MadnessASAP 1y ago
It may seem like that on the surface, but you should recognise that these sorts of situations seem to follow Kent around. So either Kent is on a righteous crusade against unreasonable processes within the Kernel, Debian, and every other large software project he interacts with. Or there's something about the way Kent interacts with these projects that causes friction. I like Bcachefs, I think Kent is a very talented developer, but I'm not going to pretend that he is innocent in all this.
- o11c 1y ago
  OTOH, the only named projects I've seen are Linux and Debian, which are 2 of the most toxic projects I'm aware of (I'm pretty sure the C++ standards committee beats the two of them combined). But the problem with comparisons is that even if you're better than nuclear waste being dumped into the aquifer, you still might be enough to light a river on fire.
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    I've been involved in C++ standardization. In my country's national body, it is nothing like what goes on in Linux kernel development, even when there are strong disagreements amongst members.
isr 1y ago
To be honest, I somewhat agree. I'm sure there's a lot to this that us outsiders don't know (or honestly, for me, couldn't be bothered to know as there are far more important rabbit holes to spend time on). However, sometimes, a certain detachment can help when looking at what is, in the end, a "cultural disagreement" more suited to an elementary school's playground. Whenever I see open source spats like this, and then see a Dev harangued and chased from forum to forum by what looks like a coordinated group ("groupies"?), all accusing him/her of rude behaviour, while they keep making attacks on his/her personality, character or temperament... it leads me to think rather poorly of this "wild west posse". Anyway, bottom line, Kent is writing open source software to benefit others (and people didn't have qualms about taking his previous bcache & using it to build out storage solutions to make millions), so perhaps he doesn't quite deserve all the abuse and ganging up, no matter whose feathers he ruffled, and how.

johnny22 1y ago

it's waaay simpler than that. Some projects have established rules, and kent doesn't want to follow them. It doesn't matter how nice (or not) he is.

bornfreddy 1y ago
I actually like the idea of the maintainer going out of his way to make sure that my filesystem is safe to use. Even if it goes against the established rules. And I'm saying that as someone who actually likes both Linux and Debian.
- rwmj 1y ago
  It's a strawman to imagine that Debian doesn't have a way to ensure filesystems are safe and to respond to critical bugs that might cause data corruption. It's just that you have to follow their rules to do it. (And broadly the same rules apply to the other big distros as well).
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    And the rules demonstrably create situations where it's easy to introduce bugs or hard to fix them, because they prioritise stability and a consistent set of package versions over the version that the upstream developer has tested. Followed blindly (and without putting in the effort to test to the same level of rigor as upstream), this causes problems, and it's right to point those out. Debian's ways would involve the package maintainer putting in a lot more effort to marry their rules with a package that actually worked, and they were not up for that. (Debian's rules aren't worthless, it's part of how they can make something that's pretty suitable for 'boring infrastructure' systems because they can keep a system with a known and stable set of behavior up to date with critical security fixes for a long time, but boy do they result in some dumb situations sometimes)

arp242 1y ago

Kent brings up Debian himself, unprompted. This is one of the problems: Kent is frequently unable to accept that things don't go his way. He will keep bringing it up again and again and he just grinds people down with it. If you see just one bit of it then it may seem somewhat reasonable, but it's really not because this is the umpteenth time this exact discussion is happening and it's groundhog day once again. This is a major reason why people burn out on Kent. You can't just have a disagreement/conflict and resolve it. Everything is a discussion with Kent. He can't just shrug and say "well, I think that's a bit silly, but okay, I can work with it, I guess". The options are 1) Kent gets his way, or 2) he will keep pushing it (not infrequently ignoring previous compromises, restarting the discussion from square one). Here too, the Debian people have this entire discussion (again) forced upon them by Kent's comments in a way that's just completely unnecessary and does nothing to resolve anything. Even as an interested onlooker who is otherwise uninvolved and generally more willing to accept difficult behaviour than most people, I've rather soured on Kent over time.

koverstreet 1y ago
You do realize that data integrity issues are not "live and let live" type things, right? And there's a real connection to the issue that sparked all this drama in the kernel and the Debian drama: critical system components (the kernel, the filesystem, and others) absolutely need to be able to get bugfixes in a timely manner. That's not optional. With Debian, we had a package maintainer who decided that unbundling Rust dependencies was more important than getting out updates, and then we couldn't get a bugfix out for mount option handling. This was a non-issue for every other distro with working processes because the bug was fixed in a few days, but a lot of Debian users weren't able to mount in degraded mode and lost access to their filesystems. In the kernel drama, Linus threw a fit over a repair code to recover from a serious bug and make sure users didn't lose data, and he's repeatedly picked fights over bugfixes (and even called pushing for getting bugfixes out "whining" in the past). There are a lot of issues that there can be give and take on, but getting fixes out in a timely manner is just part of the baseline set of expectations for any serious project.
- arp242 1y ago

MadnessASAP 1y ago

It may seem like that on the surface, but you should recognise that these sorts of situations seem to follow Kent around. So either Kent is on a righteous crusade against unreasonable processes within the Kernel, Debian, and every other large software project he interacts with. Or there's something about the way Kent interacts with these projects that causes friction. I like Bcachefs, I think Kent is a very talented developer, but I'm not going to pretend that he is innocent in all this.

o11c 1y ago
OTOH, the only named projects I've seen are Linux and Debian, which are 2 of the most toxic projects I'm aware of (I'm pretty sure the C++ standards committee beats the two of them combined). But the problem with comparisons is that even if you're better than nuclear waste being dumped into the aquifer, you still might be enough to light a river on fire.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  I've been involved in C++ standardization. In my country's national body, it is nothing like what goes on in Linux kernel development, even when there are strong disagreements amongst members.

isr 1y ago

To be honest, I somewhat agree. I'm sure there's a lot to this that us outsiders don't know (or honestly, for me, couldn't be bothered to know as there are far more important rabbit holes to spend time on). However, sometimes, a certain detachment can help when looking at what is, in the end, a "cultural disagreement" more suited to an elementary school's playground. Whenever I see open source spats like this, and then see a Dev harangued and chased from forum to forum by what looks like a coordinated group ("groupies"?), all accusing him/her of rude behaviour, while they keep making attacks on his/her personality, character or temperament... it leads me to think rather poorly of this "wild west posse". Anyway, bottom line, Kent is writing open source software to benefit others (and people didn't have qualms about taking his previous bcache & using it to build out storage solutions to make millions), so perhaps he doesn't quite deserve all the abuse and ganging up, no matter whose feathers he ruffled, and how.