Re: On community influencing (was Re: [PATCH v8 2/2] rust: add dma coherent allocator abstraction.)

Dr. David Alan Gilbert
2025-02-07T18:54:13Z

* Hector Martin (marcan@marcan.st) wrote:
> On 2025/02/08 2:14, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 07, 2025 at 05:16:28AM +0900, Hector Martin wrote:
> >> And what I see, is very little effort to improve that status quo, or at
> >> least very little that yields any actual change that isn't just
> >> band-aids (e.g. tooling like b4, which is nice and appreciated, but
> >> doesn't fix any underlying issues). And that's not going to change no
> >> matter how many long technical arguments we have on the MLs (or even off
> >> MLs, since MLs are also not particularly good for this, and I've seen
> >> multiple arguments only reach a resolution after being redirected to IRC).
> >
> > From my perspective, there are several camps clashing when it comes to the
> > kernel development model. One is people who are (rightfully) pointing out that
> > using the mailing lists was fine 20 years ago, but the world of software
> > development has vastly moved on to forges.
> >
> > The other camp is people who (also rightfully) point out that kernel
> > development has always been decentralized and we should resist all attempts to
> > get ourselves into a position where Linux is dependent on any single
> > Benevolent Entity (Github, Gitlab, LF, kernel.org, etc), because this would
> > give that entity too much political or commercial control or, at the very
> > least, introduce SPoFs.
> >
> > At best, I can hope to make both camps grumpily agree to coexist.
> >
> > I *am* very wary of Benevolent Entities, because we have too many very recent
> > examples of companies "realigning priorities" when political winds shift.
> > Programs and initiatives that have until recently been poster board examples
> > of progress and benevolence are shuttered and defunded. I am concerned that
> > we're only a couple of mood swings away from someone deciding that free
> > software should not be allowed to exist because it benefits America's foes.
> > Many of us remember all too well when large tech giants treated Linux as a
> > "cancer" to be opposed, and I can certainly see that idea easily re-entering
> > some Big Brain in Charge.
> >
> > From my perspective, I would like to ensure that Linux development can
> > continue without a hard dependency on a single centralized forge -- whether
> > controlled by a large commercial entity, or even a standalone one that is
> > operated by kernel.org. It's becoming shockingly difficult to operate a public
> > resource on the web unless you're willing to put it behind a large commercial
> > CDN that will protect you from hostile bots (and if you do that, you're back
> > to depending on the whims of a Benevolent Entity).
> >
> > We're trying to get lore.kernel.org to the point where it's like a global
> > messaging bus that is indexed and searchable. Currently, you mostly have to
> > send things to a mailing list for them to end up on lore, but it's gradually
> > becoming less and less the case. We're already bridging with bugzilla and we
> > should be able to bridge with forges soon, too (currently delayed again
> > because I'm scrambling to move kernel.org frontends away from Equinix). Who
> > knows, we may be actually leapfrogging the forge era of software development
> > straight into "AI" agents era -- but that remains to be seen.
> >
> > Anyway, all of this is to say that I'm happy that you've found b4 useful, but
> > I wouldn't view it as a band-aid -- it's just a very small and email-centric
> > way to interact with the kernel lore.
> >
>
> The centralization concern is valid, but there are technical solutions
> to this, such as forge federation. It's possible to set up a forge
> environment to be less of a SPoF, such as by ensuring all data is open
> and archiveable to allow for migration and backup restore, even by third
> parties (you can make practically ~all forge data public except for
> login passwords, and we have email-based reset processes for those).
> It's also possible to simply shard, and let different subsystems choose
> their own forge infrastructure, so downtime has a more limited effect.
>
> Meanwhile, for better or worse, much of Linux infra *is* centralized -
> for example, the mailing lists themselves, and a lot of the Git hosting.

Although, many of the subsystems have their own patchworks or other systems
anyway dotted in random places.

It's actually something I find quite hard, it might seem there is
*a* Linux contribution process, but if you do fixups or devices all over
rather than in one subsystem you end up tripping over the oddities
of each maintainer; then trying to figure out when they're prepared
to take a patch, or where to check for whether they've taken it,
or whether to expect it to turn up in -next can all be quite random.

<snip>

> - Hector

Dave

>
>
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