> I think this is a reasonable position on both sides.
I disagree. Hellwig is trying to dictate who/how uses his subsystem/code. Linus makes it clear, you don't have to use/accept Rust in your own codebase, but you can't tell others what they can do in their codebase.
Now this change caused the total net value become negative. It was perfectly okay to express his opinions. Opinion was disliked and it is pretty okay, while sad, that he stopped maintaining it. Nothing to do with dictating.
Maybe he got a lot of professional mileage from being "the" Christoph Hellwig, Linux DMA maintainer. Independent consultants need publicity.
C subsystem patches have started to be rejected by Linus because they break Rust builds despite the agreement that this wouldn't happen. That's why Hellwig switched from ignoring Rust patches sent to him for review to NACKing this one.
Hellwig did it, from what anyone can tell, to get Linus to publish the actual policy which he still hasn't done yet.
No. There was one instance of a toolchain issue accidentally including some Rust stuff when Rust was configured off, this was fairly quickly rectified. Linus even said in one of his more recent emails that this happens infrequently, but also, this happens all the time in general, and that’s why linux-next exists.
Linus did reaffirm the policy of “C folks are allowed to fully ignore Rust stuff.”
Someone can use your text parsing program to run a nuclear power plant, that's fine. The same person can't make you to accept the nuclear power plant control script as part of your repository, and support the "nuclear power plant controlling functionality" of your text parsing program.
from Linus:
> You are not forced to take any Rust code, or care about any Rust code in the DMA code. You can ignore it. [...] So when you change the C interfaces, the Rust people will have to deal with the fallout, and will have to fix the Rust bindings.
sounds like it's structured as a downstream user to me.
The fact that he was not allowed to do that is exactly why he escalated.
> The fact is, the pull request you objected to DID NOT TOUCH THE DMA LAYER AT ALL. It was literally just another user of it, in a completely separate subdirectory, that didn't change the code you maintain in _any_ way, shape, or form.