Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x457 | Hacker News Reader

> The real scandal here is the pressure to remove a maintainer based on vague "code of conduct violation grounds" when the supposed "violation" is just expressing an technical preference on code he maintains.

Definitely not what is happening here. btw what the point of CoC if it's not enforced? I'm not saying this person needs to be removed, but someone needs to talk to a person that says "You might not like my answer, but I will do everything I can do to stop this." in regard to R4L just based on personal preferences.

View on HN

Part of "being nice" is accepting that people aren't perfect and just dealing with that, within limits of reason of course. "Assume good faith" and all of that. The phrasing of "cancer" wasn't brilliant, but also really not that bad – certainly not bad enough to warrant removal from the Linux project. That's pretty draconian.

Code of Conduct is not about demanding absolute perfection and then selectively using it as a cudgel to beat people you disagree with. Doubly so since Hector's behaviour over the years has frequently been less than stellar, including in that very thread where he calls Hellwig's comments "distractions orchestrated by a subset of saboteur maintainers who are trying to demoralize you until you give up".[1] Yikes!

Using "cancer" to describe "it will spread everywhere and it will become unmaintainable" is not great, but at the core still a technical disagreement. Outright dismissing people's technical opinions and ascribing malicious motivations as part of a cabal is a mean-spirited and nasty personal attack, and essentially just an insult.

And it's really not "sabotage" to disagree or to be against something and being upfront about it. If that's "sabotage" then anyone saying "I don't think we should go ahead with this" is guilty of "sabotage".

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/2b9b75d1-eb8e-494a-b0...

> a technical disagreement.

For it to be technical disagreement, there should be _anything_ to back it up. All I've heard is "another language would spread and become unmaintainable" is one, that's just emotions. There is nothing technical about his reasoning on why he doesn't want those patches to land.

> If that's "sabotage" then anyone saying "I don't think we should go ahead with this" is guilty of "sabotage".

Sabotage part is saying "I will do anything to stop rust from landing in Linux code base" (paraphrasing). Calling in cancer just unprofessional and rude, but that's another story...which probably also violates CoC.

> "I will do anything to stop rust from landing in Linux code base" (paraphrasing)

Paraphrasing to the point where it says something completely different than was actually said.

An actual quote is "keep the wrappers in your code instead of making life painful for others". So it's about where and how.

And of course this is a technical disagreement; you just don't agree (which is fine). But please, don't pretend the disagreement doesn't exist.

Disagreement exists, but it's emotional and not technical.

> An actual quote is "keep the wrappers in your code instead of making life painful for others". So it's about where and how.

Literally the same? or you do not include "wrappers" in "rust landing in linux code base" ? Absolutely no one suffers from them landing.

I'm done arguing over this.

> Absolutely no one suffers from them landing.

"Suffers"? No. But "makes the code harder to work on from my perspective"? Well, some people think that it will. And the Rust people are agreeing with that in the very email thread: their solution is "you don't need to write Rust, we can work together on this". Whether that's a good solution is the point of disagreement.

And of course "I don't want Rust landing in Linux code base" is not the same as "I don't want Rust added to this subsystem, I think it should live somewhere else".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com