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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

One thing I don’t really understand: if conference organizers accept (or invite or whatever) a keynote speaker, and the acceptance/invitation doesn’t reference any particular topic, then presumably they are actually saying they will give a keynote slot to the speaker to speak about whatever they like. And if the speaker gives a talk about something they’ve worked on but that doesn’t have any sort of consensus to become part of Rust, so what? It’s a keynote talk, not a merge request.

If the organizers wanted a talk about an actual accepted feature, surely the invitation should have said so.

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I'm the organizer who gave the invite. It was indeed explicitly framed as "you can talk about whatever you want". In my opinion it was pretty obvious this is what JeanHeyd would talk about before the invite went out. He told us about the topic in that same call. There was a member of project leadership in the call as well, no concerns were raised about the topic. The first time JeanHeyd learned of any concerns with it was when project leadership asked me to downgrade the talk

If I understand correctly, the problem hasn't been the organisational team, but David Tolnay himself. Who intervened with the help of Josh(?). In his own words:

    Josh was aware of this from his role as not only language co-lead, but also member of the RustConf program committee1.

    I expressed forceful skepticism that the compile-time introspection work, which I had been passively following with great interest, would achieve a state that would be suitable for a RustConf keynote in time for 2023 RustConf, for lack of adequate lang team iteration (neither for the Rust Foundation grant selection, nor conference presentation) to land well with the RustConf audience.

From https://gist.github.com/dtolnay/7f5da4bf057b7c6d0d00c6bed306...

I was once invited to give a talk (which was more or less a keynote, although I don’t think the word “keynote” was used) at a major conference. I was specifically invited to talk about my work on X. IMO it would have been really odd for anyone on the program committee to subsequently say “well, I’m skeptical that project X will pan out — maybe the talk should just be a regular track talk about X or a plenary talk about Y instead” after the invitation was given.

It’s not as though giving a talk implies any particularly strong endorsement by the community at large that the subject is going to pan out. And if the talk is just about “whatever the speaker is working on”, then there is absolutely no implied endorsement of what they end up talking about.

It's not merely odd, it's a crass (if low stakes) power play by someone obviously intent on sabotage (might be personal, might be related to a perceived fiefdom etc.).

That part is not obvious to me as an outsider. And framing something that shouldn’t have been done as a power play, when it could as easily have been simple ineptitude or some other issue, seems like it weakens the argument and escalates the situation.

Plenty of people who haven’t really thought about how conferences should work end up on committees running conferences, kind of like how plenty of developers end up as high level reviewers or managers regardless of their qualifications.

It's theoretically possibile that it's ineptitude, but only barely; if "I don't think that this feature is ready yet, so I will anonimously lobby behind the scenes to avoid it being talked about in public" is the strongest exculpatory explanation that someone can find for their actions...

Also, being inept and clinging to one's position isn't a good look either.

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