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Comment by ffsm8 | Hacker News Reader

The three listed options in the OP thread were

* Another kernel Dev takes over management and they tread it as a fork (highly unlikely according to their estimate)

* Kent hires someone to upstream the changes for him and Kent stops complaining wrt when it's getting merged

* Bcachefs gets no maintenance and will likely be removed in the next major release

I do not know him personally, but most interactions I've read online by him sounded grounded and not particularly offensive, so I'm abstaining from making any kind of judgement on it.

But while I have no stake in this, Drama really does seem to follow Kent around for one reason or another. And it's never his fault if you take him by his public statements - which I want to repeat: he sounds very grounded and not offensive to me whatsoever.

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If you look at all the places where Kent has had drama, the common element is him and environments that have pretty rigid workflows. The common thread seems to be him not respecting workflows and processes that those places have, that inconvenience his goals. So, he ignores the workflows and processes of those places, and creates a constant state of friction and papercuts for those who he needs to accomplish his goals. They eventually get fed up, and either say no, not working with you anymore, or no, you’re not welcome to contribute here anymore.

He’s not super offensive, but he will tell a Debian package maintainer that their process sucks, and the should change it and they are being stupid by following that process. Overall, he seems a bit entitled, and unwilling to compromise with others. It’s not just Kent though, the areas that seem to be the most problematic for him, are when it’s an unstoppable force (Kent), and an immovable wall (Linux / Debian).

Working in the Linux kernel is well known for its frustrations and the personal conflict that it creates, to the point that there are almost no linux kernel devs/maintainers that aren’t paid to do the work. You can see a similar set of events happen with Rust4Linux people, Asahi linux project and their R4L drivers, etc.

Grounded? Not offensive?

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wiLE9BkSiq8F-mFW5NOtPzYrt...

https://lore.kernel.org/all/citv2v6f33hoidq75xd2spaqxf7nl5wb...

The first one is by Linus? And his replies (at least the ones I read) are - to me- less aggressive then the rest of the mails in that chain

The second has one offensive remark:

> Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.

which I thought he admitted was out of line and - said sorry for. Or do I misremember? I admit once again, I'm still completely uninvolved and merely saw it play out on the internet.

If you read his replies downthread from that, Kent seems to be going through a lot of effort to not apologize, in any form, and prefers talking about how other people were mean to him.

I had high hopes for bcachefs. sigh

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