When rules and authority start to take precedence over making sure things work, things have gone off the rails and we're not doing engineering anymore.
Didn't Linus lambast you for "lack of testing and collaboration before submitting patches", to the point the patches you were trying to push weren't even building?
https://ostechnix.com/linus-torvalds-expresses-frustration-w...
Linus doesn't seem to believe in automated testing. He just seems to think that there's no way I could QA code as quickly as I do, but that's because I've invested heavily in automated testing and building up a community of people doing very good testing and QA work; bcachefs's automated testing is the best of any upstream filesystem that I've seen (there's a whole cluster of machines dedicated to this), and I have people running my latest branch on a daily basis.
Nearly all of the collaboration just happens on IRC.
For big changes I wait for explicit acks from testers that they've ran it and things look good; a lot of people read and review my code too, it's just typically less formal than the rest of the kernel.
All your comments are dismissive of the criticisms so far and you’re shrugging your shoulders as to why.
It’s great you’re able to reason and defend yourself but Linux as a whole is larger than you and refusing to submit to their ways will make technology move no where.
Even taking your claims at face value (which from this thread alone is a heck of a leap) I'm baffled by the way you believe this holds any relevance.
I mean, the kernel project has in place a quality assurance process designed to minimize the odds of introducing problems when preparing a release. You were caught purposely ignoring any QA process in place and trying to circumvent the whole quality assurance process and sneak into a RC features that were untested and unverified.
There is a QA process, and you purposely decided to ignore it and plow away. And then your best argument for purposely ignoring any semblance of QA is that others may or may not have broken a build before?
Come on, man. You know better than this. How desperate are you to avoid any accountability to pull these gaslighting stunts?
Do you argue with your school teachers that your book report shouldn't be due on Friday because it's not perfect yet?
I read several of your response threads across different websites. The most interesting to me was LWN, about the debian tools, where an actual psychologist got involved.
All the discussions seem to show the same issue: You disagree with policies held by people higher up than you, and you struggle with respecting their decisions and moving on.
Instead you keep arguing about things you can't change, and that leads people to getting frustrated and walking away from you.
It really doesn't matter how "right" you may be... not your circus, not your monkeys.
Edit since you expanded your post:
>The most interesting to me was LWN, about the debian tools, where an actual psychologist got involved.
To me the comment was patronizing implying it was purely due to bad communication from Kent's end and shows how immature people are with running these operating system are. Putting priority on processes over the end user.
>respecting their decisions and moving on.
When this causes real pain for end users. It's validating that the decision was wrong.
> really doesn't matter how "right" you may be... not your circus
It does because it causes reputational damage for bcachefs. Even beyond reputational damage, delivering a good product to end users should be a priority. In my opinion projects as big as Debian causing harm to users should be called out instead of ignored. Else it can lead to practices like replacing dependencies out from underneath programs to become standard practice.
This is the difference between being smart and being wise. If the goal of all this grandstanding was that, it's so incredibly and vitally important for these patches to get into the kernel, well guess what, now due to all this drama this part of the kernel is going to go unmaintained entirely. Is that good for the users? Did that help our stated goal in any way? No.
The adult thing is to do best by the users. Critical file system bugs are worth blocking the release of any serious operating system in the real world as there is serious user impact.
>Is that good for the users?
I think it's complicated. It could allow for a faster release schedule for bug fixes which can allow for addressing file system issues faster.
Best by users in the long term is predictable processes. "RC = pure bug fixes" is a battle tested, dependable rule, absence of which causes chaos.
> Critical file system bugs are worth blocking the release
"Experimental" label EXACTLY to prevent this stuff from blocking release. Do you not know that bcachefs is experimental? This is an example of another rule which helps predictability.
>"Experimental" label EXACTLY to prevent this stuff from blocking release
In practice bcachefs is used in production with real users. If the experimental label prevents critical bug fixes from making it into the kernel then it would be better to just remove that label.
I'm not sure exactly what you are talking about, and I'm not sure you do either. The discussion that preceded bcachefs to be dropped from the Linux kernel mainline involved an attempt to sneak a new features in RC, sidestepping testing and QA work, which was followed up by yet more egregious behavior from the mantainer.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-616-Bcachefs-Late-Featur...
Too solve a bug with the filesystem that people in the wild were hitting. Like how Linus has said in the past with how there is a blurry line between security fixes and bug fixes. There is a blurry line between filesystem bugs and recovery features.
If you read the email it is clear that the full feature has more work needed and this is more of a basic implementation to address bugs that people hit in the wild.
So you acknowledge that this last episode involved trying to push new features into a RC.
As it was made abundantly clear, not only is the point of RC branches to only get tiny bugfixes after testing, the feature work that was presented was also untested and risked introducing major regressions.
All these red flags were repeatedly raised in the mailing list by multiple kernel maintainers. Somehow you're ignoring all the feedback and warnings and complains raised by people from Linux kernel maintainers, and instead you've opted to try to gaslight the thread.
bcachefs has a ton of QA, both automated testing and a lot of testers that run my latest and I work with on a daily basis. The patch was well tested; it was for codepaths that we have good regression tests for, it was algorithmically simple, and it worked perfectly to recover a filesystem from the original bug report, and it performed flawlessly again not long after.
I've explained my testing and QA on the lists multiple times.
You, like the other kernel maintainers in that thread, are making wild assertions despite having no involvement with the project.
It sounds like you have a hard time coping with reality.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-616-Bcachefs-Late-Featur...
I repeat: it sounds an awful lot like you are trying to gaslight this thread. Not cool.
When this fact was again explicitly pointed out to you by Linus himself, you even tried to bullshit Linus and try to move the goalpost with absurd claims about how somehow it was ok to force untested and unreviewed features into a RC because somehow you know better about what users want or need as if it was some kind of justification for you to skip testing and proper release processes.
You need to set aside some time for introspection because you sound like you are your own worst enemy. And those you interact with seem to be fed up and had enough of these stunts.
Sorry, the only person gaslighting here is you.
It doesn't matter if you have bugs in the code still. At all. Having bugs in the code is not relevant. You are 100%, completely, inexcusably wrong if you were providing a bugfix that wasn't fixing something specifically changed in the RC.
Untested and unreviewed? Your own testing process and review process does not meet that. "Since then" is entirely irrelevant. Saying "I've proven it works" means you have no concept of stability in a release process.
I sincerely hope your code gets the boot from the kernel, because you clearly will never be able to maintain it there. You just don't listen. To anyone.
Your personal definitions of the above terms are irrelevant. How you think the kernel should be maintained, is meaningless. Whether you think your code is ready is an insane way to validate that you're "super special and get to have your way".
Personally, I'd never hire you from this alone.
alternative perspective: those users have knowingly and willingly put experimental software into production. it was their choice, they were informed of the risk and so the consequences and responsibility are their’s.
it’s like signing up to take some experimental medicine, and then complaining no-one told me about the side-effect of persistent headaches.
that doesn’t stop anyone from being user-centric in their approach, e.g. call me if you notice any symptoms and i’ll come round your house to examine you.
… as long as everyone is clear about the fact it is experimental and the boundaries/limitations that apply, e.g. there will be certain persistent headache medicines that cannot be prescribed to you, or it might take longer for them to work because you’re on an experimental medicine.
This puts us all in a shitty situation. I want the experimental label to come off at the right time - when every critical bug is fixed and it's as trustworthy as I can reasonably make it, when I know according to the data I have that everyone is going to have a good experience - but I have real users who need this thing and need to be supported.
There is _no reason_ to interpret the experimental label in the way that you're saying, you're advocating that reliability for the end user be deprioritized versus every other filesystem.
But deprioritizing reliability is what got us into this mess.
PLEASE, honestly, EDUCATE THESE USERS. This is still marked experimental for numerous reasons regardless of the 'planned work for 6.18'. Users who can't suffer any data loss and are repeating their mistake of using btrfs shouldn't be using a none default/standard/hardened filesystem period.
In the past I've often told people who wanted to migrate off of btrfs "check back in six months", but I'm not now because 6.16 is looking amazingly solid; all the data I have says that your data really is safer on bcachefs than btrfs.
I'm not advocating for people to jump from ext4/xfs/zfs, that needs more time.
Don't compare bcachefs with btrfs for stability. Compare it with ext4. (And dont care anecdotal data, compare the process).
Now, I fully expect you to react poorly to this message, too. That is the expectation the world has formed of you. Think about that.
Good engineering requires long term thinking.
I don't know the situation well enought to review where they drew the line, but there definitely should be a line somewhere.
I think it's less subtle than that. The straw that broke the camel's back was quite literally abuse towards other kernel developers.
I read the full story. Everyone else can do the same. Somehow it seems you opt to skip it and prefer to be deeply invested in creating an alternative reality.
Excellent engineering management largely isolates engineers from having to deal with this non-engineering stuff (except for the subset that is specifically for their own personal benefit)-- but open source tends to radically flatten organizations that produce software, such that every contributor must also be their own manager to a great degree.
In a well run project you don't necessarily have to be good at or even interested in all the more socially oriented components of the project organization. But if you're not you must be willing to let someone else handle that stuff and go along with their judgements even if they seem suboptimal from the narrower perspective you've adopted. If you can't then from a "collaborative development as a system" view you're a faulty component that doesn't provide the right interface for the system's requirements (and are gonna get removed!). :)
Another way to look at it is that it would be ideal if every technical element were optimal at all times. In small systems with well understood requirements this can be possible or at least close to possible. But in big complex and poorly scoped systems it's just not possible: We have imperfect information, there are conflicting requirements, we have finite time, and so on. The system as a whole will always be far from perfect. If anyone tried to make it all perfect it would just fail to make progress, deadlock, or otherwise. The management of the project is always trying to balance the imperfections. They know that their decisions are often making things worse for a local concern, but they do so with belief that over time the decisions result in a better system overall. Linux has a good reputation in large part due to a long history of making good decisions about the flaws to accept or even introduce, which issues to gloss over vs debate to death.
For many humans to work together over time on something very complex is hard. Structure and process are required. And sometimes they come at the expense of what some might call “pure” engineering. But they are the right trade offs to optimize for the actual goal.
If you can’t accept that, stick to solo projects.