Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Al Boldi]

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Hans Reiser wrote:
> > As the other poster mentioned, they went off to startups, and did not
> > become part of our community.  How much of that was because their
> > contributions were more hassled than welcomed, I cannot say with
> > certainty, I can only say that they were discouraged by the difficulty
> > of getting their stuff in, and this was not as it should have been.
> > They were more knowledgeable than we were on the topics they spoke on,
> > and this was not recognized and acknowledged.
> >
> > Outsiders are not respected by the kernel community.  This means we miss
> > a lot.
>
> Anyone who fails to respect the kernel development process, the process
> of building consensus, is turn not respected, flamed, and/or ignored.
>
> If you don't respect us, why should we respect you?

Respect what?  The process or the content?

Rejecting content due to disrespect for process guidelines would be rather 
sad.

If the content is worth its salt, it should be accepted w/o delay, then 
modified to comply with the process guidelines as necessary.  It's what the 
GPL allows, afterall.

Thanks!

--
Al

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Horst H. von Brand]

Al Boldi <a1426z@gawab.com> wrote:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > Hans Reiser wrote:
> > > As the other poster mentioned, they went off to startups, and did not
> > > become part of our community.  How much of that was because their
> > > contributions were more hassled than welcomed, I cannot say with
> > > certainty, I can only say that they were discouraged by the difficulty
> > > of getting their stuff in, and this was not as it should have been.
> > > They were more knowledgeable than we were on the topics they spoke on,
> > > and this was not recognized and acknowledged.
> > >
> > > Outsiders are not respected by the kernel community.  This means we miss
> > > a lot.

> > Anyone who fails to respect the kernel development process, the process
> > of building consensus, is turn not respected, flamed, and/or ignored.
> >
> > If you don't respect us, why should we respect you?

> Respect what?  The process or the content?

> Rejecting content due to disrespect for process guidelines would be rather 
> sad.

But necessary, as the available manpower sadly isn't infinite.

> If the content is worth its salt, it should be accepted w/o delay,

Ideally...

>                                                                    then 
> modified to comply with the process guidelines as necessary.

... and pray who is going to do that, while making sure that the needed
cleanup and adjustments don't break it? Surely the original author is in
the best position to do this, moreover by writing directly in the accepted
way even to avoid needless work.

>                                                               It's what the 
> GPL allows, afterall.

No. The GPL allows you to branch the kernel and create your own kernel with
Reiser 4 included, it doesn't say that you have the right to get your
patches into Linus' tree. [Thankfully. I've seen such a mass of junk
proposed here over the years...]
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[H. Peter Anvin]

Followup to:  <200607241857.38889.a1426z@gawab.com>
By author:    Al Boldi <a1426z@gawab.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
> 
> Respect what?  The process or the content?
> 
> Rejecting content due to disrespect for process guidelines would be rather 
> sad.
> 

No, it's not.  That's what you have to do to keep the kernel maintainable.

> If the content is worth its salt, it should be accepted w/o delay, then 
> modified to comply with the process guidelines as necessary.  It's what the 
> GPL allows, afterall.

Uhm, no.  That's basically "throw it over the fence and let someone
else fix the crap."  Fix it first, then it can go in.

	-hpa

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Matthew Frost]

Al Boldi wrote:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> Hans Reiser wrote:
>>> As the other poster mentioned, they went off to startups, and did not
>>> become part of our community.  How much of that was because their
>>> contributions were more hassled than welcomed, I cannot say with
>>> certainty, I can only say that they were discouraged by the difficulty
>>> of getting their stuff in, and this was not as it should have been.
>>> They were more knowledgeable than we were on the topics they spoke on,
>>> and this was not recognized and acknowledged.
>>>
>>> Outsiders are not respected by the kernel community.  This means we miss
>>> a lot.
>> Anyone who fails to respect the kernel development process, the process
>> of building consensus, is turn not respected, flamed, and/or ignored.
>>
>> If you don't respect us, why should we respect you?
> 
> Respect what?  The process or the content?
> 
> Rejecting content due to disrespect for process guidelines would be rather 
> sad.
> 
> If the content is worth its salt, it should be accepted w/o delay, then 
> modified to comply with the process guidelines as necessary.  It's what the 
> GPL allows, afterall.
> 

I just love it when people try to ignore a longstanding social system 
and butt right in, demanding to be heard and acted upon with all haste. 
  Politeness and protocol are essential social lubricants for a system 
that doesn't work that well to begin with.  You've seen this fortune 
entry before.

As a system administrator, how do you handle a process that repeatedly 
violates system policy?  That repeatedly submits bad input and defies 
correction?  A user that repeatedly attempts to circumvent priority and 
management structures?    Is that content 'worth its salt' if it 
violates the good order of the system?  Or do you attempt to fix the 
program, or educate the user?  And when that fails, don't you kill that 
process, or kick that user and revoke their privileges?

The kernel developers have done better than they had to for a repeated 
violation of protocol, and an obnoxious attitude towards proper 
procedure and politeness.  Yes, there were responses in kind, and flames 
back and forth, but there were helpful suggestions and good advice, 
mostly seen as affront to the 'importance' of this particular project. 
The very attitude that "If it's good enough, it doesn't need to obey 
protocol" is what has killed Reiser4.  Understand this, above all.

Submit output that can be taken as input by this system without 
judicious additional parsing.  Be UNIX-like.  Do many separate things 
separately, do them each well, and submit them to be executed 
atomically.  If one fails, fix it and resubmit.  Reiser4 has not earned 
privileges above any other user on this system.

> Thanks!

Any time.

> --
> Al
> 

Matt

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Al Boldi]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Al Boldi wrote:
> > Respect what?  The process or the content?
> >
> > Rejecting content due to disrespect for process guidelines would be
> > rather sad.
>
> No, it's not.  That's what you have to do to keep the kernel maintainable.
>
> > If the content is worth its salt, it should be accepted w/o delay, then
> > modified to comply with the process guidelines as necessary.  It's what
> > the GPL allows, afterall.
>
> Uhm, no.  That's basically "throw it over the fence and let someone
> else fix the crap."  Fix it first, then it can go in.

Sure, it would be terrible, if we started to accept "crap", but I wouldn't 
consider content that is worth its "salt", like reiserfs4, to be "crap".

Rejection of content should be based on technical merits only, and no process 
guidelines should stay in the way of its preliminary acceptance.  Otherwise, 
we would be asking for a return to a bureaucratic system that inhibits 
innovation, which I'm sure is not the intention of anybody, I hope.

BTW, this does not mean that impoliteness should be rewarded, on the 
contrary, impoliteness has no place anywhere, and should just be ignored, 
even if the content is worth its salt.

Thanks!

--
Al

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Jeff Garzik]

Al Boldi wrote:
> Rejection of content should be based on technical merits only, and no process 
> guidelines should stay in the way of its preliminary acceptance.  Otherwise, 
> we would be asking for a return to a bureaucratic system that inhibits 
> innovation, which I'm sure is not the intention of anybody, I hope.

The most perfect filesystem in the world would be rejected, if it lacked 
a maintainer and/or is otherwise undebuggable or unmaintainable.

	Jeff

Re: the ' 'official' point of view' expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Luigi Genoni]

Please, I'm starting to me quite upset of all those references to impoliteness.

Every time on lkml someone talks about reiserFS/reiser4, immediatelly after
espressing his technical point (if he has something to say, of course), then
he feels he needs to add that developers should be polite. i.e he feels he
needs to take the distance from reiserFs developers attitude towards other
kernel maintainers.

I am replying to this mail because it is the last one I am reading, but the
previos mails from all the other who discussed this topic are really tipical
about this attitude.

I follow lkml since years, I know very well what happened, but do you think
that people are going to change, and their attitude is going to improve, if
in every post they read, they fell to be marked as "the bad guy ready to
flame everyone who disagrees with him in the worst impolite way"? If you
want thing to go better, please avoid those considerations and be happy just
focusing on the technical arguments.

Luigi Genoni

On Tue, July 25, 2006 06:57, Al Boldi wrote:

> BTW, this does not mean that impoliteness should be rewarded, on the
> contrary, impoliteness has no place anywhere, and should just be ignored,
> even if the content is worth its salt.
>

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Horst H. von Brand]

Al Boldi <a1426z@gawab.com> wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > Al Boldi wrote:
> > > Respect what?  The process or the content?

> > > Rejecting content due to disrespect for process guidelines would be
> > > rather sad.

> > No, it's not.  That's what you have to do to keep the kernel maintainable.
> >
> > > If the content is worth its salt, it should be accepted w/o delay, then
> > > modified to comply with the process guidelines as necessary.  It's what
> > > the GPL allows, afterall.

> > Uhm, no.  That's basically "throw it over the fence and let someone
> > else fix the crap."  Fix it first, then it can go in.

> Sure, it would be terrible, if we started to accept "crap", but I wouldn't 
> consider content that is worth its "salt", like reiserfs4, to be "crap".

If the content is OK, but requires a /lot/ of work to integrate, it is a
liability. 

> Rejection of content should be based on technical merits only, and no
> process guidelines should stay in the way of its preliminary acceptance.

Reiser 4 has been accepted in principle, so this isn't an issue at
all. There have been /serious/ technical objections to its current state,
tho...

> Otherwise, we would be asking for a return to a bureaucratic system that
> inhibits innovation, which I'm sure is not the intention of anybody, I
> hope.

There was never any bureaucratic system here, just a meritocracy. And yes,
the merits are not only in terms of "this code is cool" but also in terms
of "this code integrates well with the rest" and "there is a very good
chance that it will be maintained in-kernel by its creator"

> BTW, this does not mean that impoliteness should be rewarded, on the 
> contrary, impoliteness has no place anywhere, and should just be ignored, 
> even if the content is worth its salt.

How is that not rewarding impoliteness? Nobody here is forced to work on
the kernel. Somebody who doesn't want to play nice with others has no place
here.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Lexington Luthor]

Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> Reiser 4 has been accepted in principle, so this isn't an issue at
> all. There have been /serious/ technical objections to its current state,
> tho...
> 

Where can I find this list of issues relating to the current version of 
reiser4?

Thanks,
LL

Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org

[Matthias Andree]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Al Boldi wrote:

> Rejection of content should be based on technical merits only, and no process 

It pretty much looks like the original rejection (not to forget that)
after review was based on technical reasons, then the messenger was
hurt, and that's where the fussing started and it thus became a social
issue.

-- 
Matthias Andree