Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough" 909
The Slashdolt writes "After a stern criticism from Linus, the long-time kernel hacker Alan Cox has decided to walk away as the maintainer of the TTY subsystem of the Linux Kernel, stating '...I've had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I've zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer
can send them to the new maintainer.'" A response to a subsequent post on the list makes it quite clear that he is serious.
Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for all the hard work. Good luck to the next maintainer. Not much else to say.
So long and thanks for all the code. (Score:4, Insightful)
Overall I hope Alan finds a new project, I suspect that his experience could really help all sorts of userland code.
Coders are stubborn and dislike being told how to do anything. No shame in saying shove it when its time.
Storm
Re:So long and thanks for all the code. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, and bizarrely enough, there is a high level FreeBSD developer named Alan Cox too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox [wikipedia.org]
back in 1938 (Score:5, Funny)
Back in 1938, a massive alien invasion took place in Grover's Mills, New Jersey -- during Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast about Martians. Maybe it wasn't a hoax? Applications were discovered for social security cards from a list of men with no backgrounds -- all named Cox:
Alan Cox
John Big Cox
Dewey Cox
Dixon Cox
Ima Cox
.
Re:So long and thanks for all the code. (Score:5, Funny)
I was just going to reply and say the same thing as the GP - there is another Alan Cox for FreeBSD.
I have a theory that all OSes have their own Alan Cox but maybe they sometimes use pseudonyms to keep that secret!
Re:So long and thanks for all the code. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So long and thanks for all the code. (Score:5, Insightful)
If Alan Cox wanted to work at Apple, it would take 1 phone call. Devs like him don't have problems getting hired. I don't know if he's been working on FreeBSD or not, but if so that isn't the reason.
Especially if he wanted to work on the tty code (Score:5, Funny)
"If Alan Cox wanted to work at Apple, it would take 1 phone call."
Especially if he wanted to work on the tty code.
-- Terry
Re:So long and thanks for all the code. (Score:5, Informative)
There are two Alan Coxes, one for Linux and one for FreeBSD. It's confusing but there you go.
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
How about "Nice work Linus, you'll have the entire kernel back to yourself any day now, I'm sure"
Back three years ago I was sure I'd never leave. Now, I was no kernel dev, but I found out what it was like to try. In the meantime I grew up, and realised there's two sides to Linux.
Go and have a look at forums.gentoo.org, where you'll see both at work. I gave up too. For a long time I thought, through contributions and advocacy, I'd help Linux make some real headway in the Server and desktop market. Eventually I came to believe that it would never be big, it'd just mean more communities and more infighting and little real progress.
So I'm sorry, Alan. I'm really sorry, but you've made the right move. Thanks for everything.
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Former Gentoo and Debian user here...same experience exactly, except I actually did contribute code from time to time (well, mostly bugfixes). The Gentoo maintainers were particularly rude, and you had to pretty much be rude right back to convince them that what you had done was correct. Totally draining experience.
In an offtopic note, I remember a sort of userland breaking point: I tried to drag and drop a jpg in a browser window (Firefox) to some photo editor. It didn't work. Macs and Windows have been able to do this since at least the mid-90s. I have no idea if you can drag an image from Firefox to the Gimp nowadays, and I don't care.
Re:Thanks (Score:4, Informative)
I tried to drag and drop a jpg in a browser window (Firefox) to some photo editor. It didn't work. Macs and Windows have been able to do this since at least the mid-90s. I have no idea if you can drag an image from Firefox to the Gimp nowadays, and I don't care.
Just tried it, GIMP connected to the server and pulled the image from there. Not sure if that's how you want it to work though.
Drag'n'drop (Score:4, Interesting)
Drag and drop is quite convenient. It is also a security chasm. Once you can drag and drop one thing then you want to be able to drag and drop anything. In the case of arbitrary file formats not only must you implement code to check the incoming data stream (thus exposing yourself to all of the security considerations of "how many different ways can someone try to wax my process of checking the incoming data stream?") but you must consider that a data stream which is valid using one codec algorithm may cause a fault using another codec algorithm. Competing algorithms exist for many data format structures and the presumed same data format may have three or four codecs at use between X, the WM, a monolithic app like a web browser, and a devoted data editor (eg. GIMP), and even a devoted data viewer (eg. a multiformat display application). It isn't the simplest consideration.
With so much of the problem and criticism with the reigning proprietary OS being security related the open source community has tried to remain a little more focused on security related issues. Combine that with the difference in conceptual organization--F/OSS guys don't get paid to go to in house meetings together--and it is completely logical that something as "simple" as drag and drop is not implemented across largely unrelated application development groups.
Within a particular desktop environment using apps which were written specifically for that desktop environment (often referred to as a desktop suite) there is probably a more consistent end user experience.
It is the culmination of (years of) similar situations which has brought many rifts in major F/OSS development groups.
I find myself personally familiar with the situation which caused Alan to leave. The difference is that Alan has enough financial backing and social connections behind him that he likely will not end up living on the streets.
Can you imagine a headline,"Major developer sick and tired of political crap, leaves development group, will take up a section of cardboard on the sidewalk just down the block from Slashdot's HomelessinLaJolla"?
Re:Drag'n'drop (Score:5, Insightful)
"Once you can drag and drop one thing then you want to be able to drag and drop anything. In the case of arbitrary file formats not only must you implement code to check the incoming data stream (thus exposing yourself to all of the security considerations of "how many different ways can someone try to wax my process of checking the incoming data stream?") but you must consider that a data stream which is valid using one codec algorithm may cause a fault using another codec algorithm."
But isn't that precisely what object orientation was invented to solve? To find a way of unifying data transfer between absolutely everything, everywhere, by sending not raw data but objects which could then be queried to ask things like 'what kind of thing are you?' and 'give me your data in Format X, Y or Z which I can read'.
Drag and drop to me is one of the acid tests of 'do you actually have a functioning object model?' And pretty much every GUI OS, including Windows and OSX, fails this: drag and drop works in many places, if the developers have jumped through hoops to but not all; there's no way to universally query ANY object and do stuff with it. The only exception I can think of is, perhaps, Smalltalk/Squeak (the original OO system) with its direct-object-manipulation interface.
Why didn't the promise of OO happen? We got COM objects instead which seem to do almost precisely the opposite: be very brittle, add a whole layer of complexity, and only make sense inside huge frameworks which can't be split up into objects. C++ seems to be the anti-Smalltalk in almsot every way and yet it still gets to be called 'object oriented'. How did we allow such confusion of language?
I don't agree that the answer is 'drag and drop is far too complicated and you shouldn't be trying to do that'. We should say 'hey, this poses interesting questions about why our fundamental operating system models are, in 2009, still broken even by 1979 standards.'
Re:Drag'n'drop (Score:5, Insightful)
Why didn't the promise of OO happen?
I wasn't around for it. But I'd say it's just another example of cargo cult programming [wikipedia.org].
It's much easier to say you're doing something, and maybe to observe some of the rituals, than to actually do the work. A lot of people working in OO languages don't even know what constitutes real OO. And I don't blame them; most intro Java books, for example, just give little snippets of procedural code with an occasional OO gloss.
You can see the same pattern happening today with Agile development. Some people get great results by deeply changing how they work. Others hear about it, adopt a fraction of it, and still see improvement. Then a lot of other people jump on the bandwagon, watering it down to the point where it's worthless, but in the meantime turning a big profit on certification, training, and consulting.
Re:Drag'n'drop (Score:5, Insightful)
What drivel. Drag'n'Drop is the shortcut equivalent of 'Save File' in program 1, 'Open File' in program 2. It's a bunch of o' bytes. It makes absolutely no difference if the bytes come through the Drag'n'Drop route or through a file.
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
The unstable ABI is the result of the kernel devs wanting for devices drivers to be in the source tree. The implication is that with a stable ABI, there would be no incentive to release source code and to include this code in the kernel.
Windows H/W support from my POV is abysmal, and that is even with MS' at-all-cost backward compatibility culture. Creative's SB Live drivers do not work at all in Vista. They work fine on all recent versions of Linux distros. Because Windows is so widely used, H/W manufactures have to make passable drivers in order to get their product sold. However, once they are finished with selling them, you get situations like these in which old devices are unsupported. Normally this is ok as the backward compatibility works, but it doesn't all the time.
From my point of view, the current Linux dev model for driver is the right way to go with the current state of things in the free software world. Having a stable ABI for kernel modules will fix some short term problems but cause long term ones in the dev model.
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless you're running Vista x64, have 4GB or more of memory, and are trying to install the drivers for a TV tuner. Doesn't matter which manufacturer, they all would tend to fuck up under such conditions. I gave up trying to get TV tuners to work on my rig after wasting close to $250 on various models cuz I found only one commonality amongst them: they don't fucking work.
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
I switched to *BSD 5-6 years ago, the reason being that the community was more relaxed and there was less politics. I've been really happy, the users are more informed and the developers are more eager to help out and less elitist. The best technical solution is chosen and there is way less "not invented here" attitude among the developers. The development is more structured and is not based on the opinions/goals of a single person.
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand his frustration. I've walked-away as well from various clubs. You volunteer hundreds of hours of your time, without pay, and all you hear from the members is complaint-after-complaint-after-complaint.
You eventually reach a point where you say, "What am I doing this for? No one's appreciating it or saying thanks. I could be out having fun instead of this shit," and then you stop volunteering.
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>You just described why I mostly use commercial software. Because they take all my complaining with a smile and a nod and get to work.
Yeah well it's easy to smile when you're getting paid $2000 a week (or more with overtime). When you're not being paid as a volunteer for Linux or officer of a club, you start to wonder if there are better things you could be with your $0.00/hour payment. The answer is usually "yes" like laying on a beach, or watching TV, or partying with friends.
Heck even working at Walmart for $8/hour would be an improvement than listening to all the bitching club members/users. At least Walmart pays.
Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
Linus is brilliant. He is funny. Most days I really agree with anything he has to say.
However, he has butted heads with people in the past. Perhaps this is just human nature and unavoidable from time to time. Linus isn't perfect, nor always right. I thought he was really unfair to Con Kolivas when he drove Con away.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm tired of that silly myth.
The best programmers I have met were nice people and they were very easy to get along with and work with.
Re:Linus (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Linus (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot to use the word "inversely" in that statement.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked with programmers, actors, and people in many other groups where some think they can get away with being a prima donna. I have yet to meet anyone who was in top form in their field that I had to work with who really did have that attitude. I know some are out there, but overall, those that want to do something right are too concerned about what they're doing to pump up their own ego. Generally the best are the ones that know more than others, but because of that, they realize how much they DON'T know and that tends to keep them from getting those ego highs.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Informative)
That's called the Dunning-Kruger effect [wikipedia.org]
Re:Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
Harry Truman used to say he didn't want to talk to experts because an expert was just someone who didn't want to learn anything more on a subject because if he did, then he'd find out he didn't know it all and wasn't an expert any longer.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Funny)
Harry Truman used to say he didn't want to talk to experts because an expert was just someone who didn't want to learn anything more on a subject because if he did, then he'd find out he didn't know it all and wasn't an expert any longer.
Yeah, Harry was a real expert on experts.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. The best programmers don't know if they're awesome. They just think everyone else is stupid.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Funny)
Being smarter is a big factor in programming well. Being obviously smarter than those around you is, well, a major cause of huge ego syndrome.
Don't you get a swollen head when you walk amongst dullards? Every time I see somebody pushing at the 'pull' on a door, I feel my disdain for others rising. When I stand behind a dunce in line, and hear him ask how many eggs in a dozen, I grow more sure of my position among the intellectual greats. When a waiter is unable to figure sums on his pad to give me a total, that I might reimburse him fairly for his service, I scoff at the fools that populate this world. In fact, in every day, in every way, the imbeciles I walk around cause my ego to grow nigh unto titanic proportions, certain I must be nearly akin to God Himself in my intellectual powers.
And I can only program in Basic. Imagine those towers of mind that must be a C programmer!
Re:Linus (Score:4, Insightful)
A tested IQ of 151... and you think IQ is related to intelligence?
Re:Linus (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, that tells me something!
Re:Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
That is actually just an UI bug in the door. If you want people to push a door, you should use a handle that is like a plate, where you can easily put your hand against and push it. If you want people to pull the door open, you need to use vertical rod as a handle, where people can easily grab on to pull it. With this very small change, you don't even need to push/pull texts on the doors.
Also, doors should be always pulled when you go in and pushed when you go out. That makes exiting the building easier in case of emergency (people don't rush to the door and jam it, preventing anyone from pulling it open.) and also when people are trying to get in and out at the same time, the person outside is more capable of keeping the door open for the person going out (it is better that people first get out, before new people get in, because inside there is a limited space, while outside contains usually a lot more room). Also outside usually contains more room for pulling, while the inside often has a wall that limits the space for pulling, especially if you want to keep the door open for someone else.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Informative)
He's obviously read "Psychology of Everyday Things" (later reprinted as "Design of ..."), where this door UI issue is discussed in several case studies. "POET" is a classic must-read for anyone that designs anything that anyone might be expected to use.
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0465067107/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248908564&sr=1-1 [amazon.com]
Re:Linus (Score:5, Funny)
That's okay, intelligence is simply potential you don't always use. I take pride in this fact, as I'm saving all my smart moments up for when I finally meet Hawking in person and frickin' own him.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
The quality of a programmer is often proportional to his ego.
Be careful: Humans confuse cockiness with expertise [newscientist.com].
Re:Linus (Score:4, Informative)
Con wrote some fantastic code that benchmarks over years constantly showed to be a huge improvement. Linus refused to incorporate good code.
Con maintained his patches separately, Even better, he took criticism on his work and sought to improve it. Time after time he made changes to his work to try and make it more acceptable to Linus. Linus rebuked Con and said not nice things. Con kept working.
This continued for years. Eventually Linus realized that Con was right on scheduler philosophy. But Linus couldn't admit that he had been an overbearing ass for the past three years on a technical issue where he was clearly wrong. He asked someone else to write a new scheduler from scratch rather than use one that has been tested for three years. When the new scheduler was hastily written, and Con's was faster, Linus said he only cared about superior code and making the right decision for the kernel. But he made sure to make several personal attacks on Con for good measure.
Logically, Linus inserted untested code that was still being developed in as the new scheduler. It didn't matter if it was technically inferior and unstable. His justification was that he felt the new code would be supported, where as Con would never support his code. This assertion flies in the face of Con supporting and improving his patches for years. I've contacted Con on his mailing list. He was always cordial, and willing to support people who wanted to use his patches. Nobody made Con support those patches. But he had the mailing list none the less.
There is no logical justification for taking inferior, untested, unstable code over superior, stable, tested code. Even worse, there was no reason for Linus to repeatedly attack Con personally and lie about him.
It is one thing to suggest Hans Reiser would abandon reiser4 the way he did reiser3. It is another to make baseless accusations at good developers.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
Serious question: what percentage of the current Linux kernel was actually written by Linus?
Re:Linus (Score:5, Informative)
Like him or not, Linus is still the man in linux kernel development circles, and for good reason.
Re:Linus (Score:4, Informative)
You just need to change in your article the name "linus" by "ingo" and then your post may have some sense. Which shows how much you "know" about the topic.
Linus didn't even bothered with the scheduler, Ingo was the maintainer and it was him who was in charge of deciding what should replace it. It was him who argued, not linus. It was him who ended up admitting that the ideas from Con were good and he wrote the scheduler which is now into the kernel. One that, according to Con, was better than his own scheduler.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the LKML for years.
Ingo did write the new scheduler, at the request of Linus. Ingo didn't make personal attacks on Con.
Linus was the one for years who said Con was wrong about scheduler theory. Ingo admitted Con was correct, but Linus wouldn't admit he was wrong. Linus asked Ingo to write a new scheduler, basically ignoring the one Con had submitted.
When several people pushed to include Con's scheduler (which at that point was called Staircase) Linus made more personal attacks and wrapped it up saying that Con couldn't be trusted to support his work.
Ingo had nothing to do with that.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Funny)
You just need to change in your article the name "linus" by "ingo" and then your post may have some sense. Which shows how much you "know" about the topic.
Linus didn't even bothered with the scheduler, Ingo was the maintainer and it was him who was in charge of deciding what should replace it. It was him who argued, not linus. It was him who ended up admitting that the ideas from Con were good and he wrote the scheduler which is now into the kernel. One that, according to Con, was better than his own scheduler.
Ingo might as well the be the secret lover of Linus or his offspring from a parallel universe. The guy talks so fondly of him you'd think they run through the fields in slow motion towards one another as the Sound of Music is playing in the back drop.
Re:hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm ready to scream bloody murder over it not being included yet.
Re:hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Vendor lock-in.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Informative)
BSD has terrible driver support compared to Linux.
My experience has been exactly the opposite. It wasn't until Ubuntu 8.10 came around (having also tried Red Hat and Gentoo) that I found Linux's driver support to be acceptible. By contrast, my OpenBSD installs always worked for me out of the box. The only driver issue that's ever irked me there were USB-serial adapters. But the ease of configuration in OpenBSD has always been great, especially for wireless.
Anyhow, it probably depends on what you're doing, and with what hardware. Just thought I'd throw that out there, though.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm reading the thread. This is my take.
Cox -> submits code which apparently caused a bug
User -> Reports breakage
Cox -> Can't replicate breakage and asks user for debug info so he can fix it.
User -> Says they don't know what to debug for, but is willing to work with Cox.
Linus -> Jumps in and calls Cox's code a buggy piece of shit before any debugging took place, and before it is established if the code is buggy or not.
Cox -> Continues to troubleshoot the issue.
Linus -> Flames Cox personally and says Cox is unwilling to work on the issue.
Cox -> Takes his ball and goes home, except in this case, it is OSS so he doesn't really take any ball with him. He just leaves.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Funny)
Let me take a shot at summarizing the summary...
cox: have sum code lol!!!
:-/
user: ur kung fu is weak my pooter crashed and it's all ur fault lame!
cox: i feex! i feex! -starts furiously working-
A hush falls over the land, just then...
linus: RAWR! I SMASH!!! -flames shoot out of every orifice; a baby is heard crying in the distance-
cox: zOMG!!! -fills pants; amazingly, continues working furiously to "feex"-
linus: BRAWR! YOUR SLAVISH DEVOTION TO OTHERS ANGERS ME forabsolutelynoreason BRAWR!!!
user: wtf.
cox: -terrified of linus-beast, with singed eyebrow hairs- I leev! -boogies out, stage left-
bill gates (barely visible in background, deep stage right): -twirls mustachio-
all users: srsly, wtf.
me: -bows-
You missed one point: Linus was right (Score:5, Insightful)
>Cox -> submits code which apparently caused a bug
>User -> Reports breakage
>Cox -> Can't replicate breakage and asks user for debug info so he can fix it.
>User -> Says they don't know what to debug for, but is willing to work with Cox.
Here they have found the bottom issue: emacs was expecting some reasonable behavior from the kernel: data delivery before notification of producer's termination. The behavior was broken.
>Linus -> Jumps in and calls Cox's code a buggy piece of shit before any debugging took place, and before it is established if the code is buggy or not.
Hello? The code broke a reasonable expectations of its users. Not buggy? That's technically is a DEFINITION of a bug.
>Cox -> Continues to troubleshoot the issue.
>Linus -> Flames Cox personally and says Cox is unwilling to work on the issue.
Cox was proposing some strange solutions.
>Cox -> Takes his ball and goes home, except in this case, it is OSS so he doesn't really take any ball with him. He just leaves.
Then they had a technical discussion, and it appeared that Linus was right.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Informative)
The whole thing is publicly available. See This Google Groups thread [google.com]
The big problem is that there where multiple issues, at least one of which was a userspace bug. Cox originally questioned the Emacs code on one half of the bug, although he seems to have since taken that back. At first Cox seemed insistent on solving the issue one way which appeared to work but was not technically sound. But now he and Linus appear to agree on the basic solution, although a few issues sound like they still need to be hashed out.
Overall a classic miscommunication flare-up.
Re:Linus (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, I see now what happened. Linus won the technical battle, but wasn't satisfied at Cox's capitulation. Cox wanted to lose the argument with grace, Linus wouldn't let him.
A classic moment in arguing. A sly technique in the midst of an argument when you realize that despite everything you said to the contrary, you are really, really wrong. But, you don't want to admit it and the other person hasn't figured out that you know you're wrong. So you say something deliberately confusing that could be interpreted as supporting your opponent's argument, or your previous one. He assumes you are supporting the same side as ever and continues to hammer the point. You continue to make misleading statements, until you've slowly started to argue his side a little clearer. At this point he's really confused and asks you if you support your original statement, you say that's absurd and would never believe such a stupid thing. He's won, but you don't agree you were ever wrong. Just a "miscommunication" and "we were both right".
My younger brother used to do that to me all the time. Drove me nuts.
Re:Theo (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh boy, I can't agree more with this statement. I realize this is anecdotal, but here's my own personal experience...
In the Gentoo Freenode channel, it was difficult to so much as type without bumping into someone's ego. Participants were generally rude, crude, and--perhaps most ironically--threatened to kick people for using swear words. I have no idea if this has changed at all in the 4 or 5 years since I last joined... but it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Contrasted with the various FreeBSD channels I used to join infrequently, the experience was on the whole much better. People were friendlier, had a sense of humor, were helpful, and didn't get their underpants in a dozen knots over something incidental like a single, mostly unoffensive swear word. Again, it's been years since I participated in that as well and perhaps the FreeBSD channels have changed...
Personally, I doubt it. It's a cultural difference, I think. The BSD crowds seem more product-driven (let's get Y done) versus some Linux distros that seem process-driven (I don't like how you're doing X and it doesn't matter if we're making Y).
This, of course, is purely anecdotal. You don't have to agree with it because it was my personal experience, and as such, FreeBSD folks have come off to me as MUCH more friendly and cooperative.
Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious about how projects, in general, fare after someone with rather intimate knowledge leaves for whatever reason. I'm not being specific to Linux; you gotta think some of the kernel developers of Windows have left over the years. That's gotta be hard on the next person regardless of project; "here's his code, all three million lines of it. Oh, he seemed to like Pascal syntax so he wrote all these macros to make his C++ code look like Pascal. Good luck!"
Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Funny)
Remember Windows ME?
Bingo.
(Just kidding I have no idea WHAT went wrong there)
Requisite XKCD answers your question (Score:5, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/323/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, ive jumped into quite a few projects replacing a previous programmer. Some were experienced and reading their code was really interesting, others were fired for being incompetent and I ended up rewriting most of their code.
In any cases, the first few days, weeks or months depending on the size of the code are spent studying the structure rather than actually coding.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
ive jumped into quite a few projects replacing a previous programmer. Some were experienced and reading their code was really interesting, others were fired for being incompetent and I ended up rewriting most of their code.
In any cases, the first few days, weeks or months depending on the size of the code are spent studying the structure rather than actually coding.
The differences here are that A) this is an open-source project, B) this is a *HIGH PROFILE* open source project, and C) Alan was the maintainer, not sole coder (so he both coded, and accepted patches from others.)
It's possible that Alan was the only one who knew anything about the TTY code and how it worked, but I'd doubt it. I'd be really surprised if the new maintainer comes into the role cold.
Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is why you have to have coding standards...
I'd also hope you never have 1 person in charge of 3M lines of code.
No gratitude? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No gratitude? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No gratitude? (Score:5, Informative)
I see the tags 'butthurt' and 'whaaaaaaaaa', but no 'thanksforyourtime'. Why won't anyone show any gratitude for the years of work he's generously offered to the project?
If you really want to know, google up the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" and the Penny Arcade comic that comes up will explain it for you, though you can probably guess the gist from the name. Sad but true.
Re:No gratitude? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the slashdot crowd is composed mostly of whiner douche-bags. The rest of us are masochists so far as I can tell.
After getting my head ripped off for mentioning that I liked operator overloading the other day, I'm trying to figure out why I still post here. I dunno if the crowd is getting nastier or now that I'm far removed from being a teenager, I see how bad it always was. I can't have a reasonable discussion on this site anymore without some asshat hijacking it and turning it into a flame fest.
Re:No gratitude? (Score:4, Funny)
>After getting my head ripped off for mentioning that I liked operator overloading the other day
Is this the 5 minute argument or the full half hour?
Re:No gratitude? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha. Yes. You did indeed fix that for me.
(And I got modded insightful for my own whining? WTF?)
Re:No gratitude? (Score:4, Insightful)
FTFBOY
On slashdotting... (Score:5, Interesting)
WHY can't lkml.org's mailing list retriever handle a slashdotting?
Its not like the flashcrowds are all THAT big.
Re:On slashdotting... (Score:5, Informative)
Try Google Groups [google.com].
That's the entire thread, supposedly.
Slashdotted - Google Cache. (Score:5, Informative)
In before the Karma-Whores.
"stern criticism" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/373&hl=en&strip=1
"decided to walk away" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/375&hl=en&strip=1
"quite clear that he is serious" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/378&hl=en&strip=1
Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links (Score:4, Informative)
"stern criticism" -> link 1 [74.125.155.132]
"decided to walk away" -> link 2 [74.125.155.132]
"quite clear that he is serious" -> link 3 [74.125.155.132]
Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links (Score:5, Insightful)
care."
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
Linux is a great product, and that is the result of the magnificent work of all the coders and contributers. But sometimes they just act like children.
Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links (Score:4, Funny)
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
Please talk to the moderators at Slashdot. I no longer care.
Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links (Score:5, Insightful)
I sometimes wonder if it's the very public nature of Linux (and much open source) development that gives that creates this impression of everyone acting like children. I've heard plenty of people describing working environments (no matter the expertise) that sound exactly the same as this, it's just that no one outside the company will ever see it. It's kind of a software development soap opera...
*It happens (Score:5, Informative)
Time for all to give Alan a sound round of applause and thanks! The TTY subsystem is a gem thanks to his work.
Not diplomatic (Score:4, Insightful)
This could have been handled much better via a private message (or phone call) than in a public forum.
Rarely the diplomate (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, indeed it could have been. But unfortunately that's Linus' modus operandi and we all know from long experience that while a great programmer, his ego is far too big to allow him to apologize publicly in the same fashion in which he slammed Alan. Quite unfortunate really since both are quite talented individuals.
You can't expect to publicly berate people and have them bow to your every demand and not have it backfire on you at some point.
Re:Rarely the diplomate (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Rarely the diplomate (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, he can be pretty abrasive. Consider this: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/701694/focus=706950 [gmane.org]
Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't
stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in
that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the
point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.
(emphasis mine)
In other News . . (Score:5, Funny)
Alan Cox announces he will maintain Slashcode: "After this, it will be bloody easy to maintain the Slashcode codebase."
Could anyone shed some light... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Could anyone shed some light... (Score:5, Informative)
The details are that TTYs in general on any *nix are a huge mess with lots of complicated interactions and weird historical behavior that doesn't make sense. The linux tty stack for a long time was a huge clusterfuck. Now thanks to Alan it's just a normal clusterfuck. That's the context for this incident, which basically happened like this...
Some dudes: there's a bug in the ttys
Alan: ok lets fix it
Some dudes: here's a patch
Alan: that patch breaks a dozen other things
Some dudes, Alan reject a bunch of solutions
Alan: we can fix it with a hack, but it breaks emacs. Emacs is relying on unspecified behavior, so it can go suck an egg.
Linus: well it SHOULD (sic) work like this, and emacs is too holy to break. This problem is easy, are you a retard?
Alan: look we can hack it and break emacs, or do a huge rewrite
Linus: hacks suck, linux should be awesome in every way. Also, your code smells
Alan: it's going to take forever to get this right
Linus: then revert the patch that introduced the bug
Alan: that patch was applied years ago and removing it would break a dozen other things. You didn't think I'd think of that? Who's the tty maintainer anyway, jackass?!
Linus: I don't like your attitude
Alan: Then fuck off I quit!
Linus: Oh yeah did I mention your code smells?
Linus: and let me quote you something you said earlier, so I can show what a bad attitude you have.
The TTY and serial line code is basically a huge Rube Goldberg machine and Linus was telling Alan to tweak something somewhere in the middle of this huge contraption. Having followed the TTY code a fair bit, I totally side with Alan on this. It's a miracle that it even works, and not something you can just stick your head in and give advice about how to fix. Also, if Linus is so concerned about proper behavior for user space programs maybe he should take a look at ioctl... because it's completely screwed up in linux.
Thank You (Score:5, Insightful)
Handbags at 10 paces... (Score:5, Funny)
"You claim that emacs sh*ts itself when it gets EAGAIN, and you think
that's an emacs bug. And I think you're full of crap..."
I'm sure there's a job waiting in the diplomatic corps for Mr Torvalds...
I knew it (Score:5, Funny)
probably went like this (Score:5, Funny)
Alan: No Way! i quit!
Linus was right (Score:5, Insightful)
As always.
The argument started when someone found the tty layer had a regression. Linus cares about regression deeply. His basic philosophy is old bug is better than new bug. If a fix introduces a new bug that breaks a real world application, then the fix should be reverted and a better fix should be worked out.
This ensures predictable behavior of an OS that you can actually rely on, and better release management.
Alan didn't think so. He thought his fix was too important to be backed out, although it introduced a regression. Linus was frustrated that he had to explain to Alan, a long time Linux hacker, about the rules. And that's where Alan got impatient too.
The butt hurt started with KDESU? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously? KDESU is broken, in the first place.
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=kdesu
both wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming what Linus said is true, about Alan blaming user land code for problems he was responsible for, then Alan was clearly in the wrong. However, Linus is wrong to have taken him to task in such a public forum. If he had any sense, he'd have done it privately, and Alan Cox would probably still be the maintainer. There's more to managing people than simply "being right".
Re:Should I? (Score:5, Funny)
How long does a bear have to be? Is it proportional to long cat?
Re:Should I? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Open-Source developers are jerks (Score:5, Insightful)
The overwhelming majority of people I have encountered are jerks. That's nothing open source developers, or any kind of developer, has a monopoly on.
Re:Open-Source developers are jerks (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was in college, I was in a volunteer group. I took a project leadership position, and I was warned that the people volunteering for us were unreliable and unpleasant to work with. Later I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case. Of course people did mess up from time to time and sometimes people found themselves over-committed, but on balance I found the volunteers cheerful, eager and reliable as I could reasonably expect under the circumstances.
I found other project leaders would talk about *the same people* I worked with successfully as if they were totally unreliable. What was mystifying is that I am so *not* a nice guy. I'm not a *bad* guy, either, but I'm kind of gruff and impatient, and I don't mince words either.
So I watched how *they* managed volunteers, and compared to how *I* managed volunteers.
I'd say, "Can you do such and so on Saturday? You'll need to show up at noon and stay until four. You can? Good. Do you want to scare up some helpers or would you like to take care of that? Great, thanks. Give me a call if anything changes."
They'd say, "Look, we really, really need somebody to do such and so. I know you're *so* busy, and I really hate to ask you to do this, but nobody else can and we're desperate. Can you, PLEASE? Really? Are you *sure*? It'll be a disaster if nobody shows up so I really need to know for sure. Really? OK I know this is a HUGE sacrifice for you."
The conclusion I came to was that the other guys were trying way too hard to be nice, and so they were failing on an epic scale. It didn't even *occur* to me to try to be nice, and so I didn't commit any of their horrible mistakes.
I think the problem with the phony "nice" approach was it demonstrated lack of respect in so many ways. First of all their attitude practically radiated their lack of confidence in the volunteer. They assumed the volunteer didn't want to volunteer, and would volunteer just to shut them up (probably true) and then not show up (also often true). They assumed the volunteer would be swayed by flattery (you're so busy), guilt (it'll be a disaster if you don't show up), twisted pride (this is a job so horrible nobody but you would consent to do).
It's hard not to step on that disrespect third rail now and then, but these guys were jumping up and down on it from the get-go. It's ALWAYS a mistake. If you want a guy to leave, you should just say, "Sorry, this isn't working out. Let's move on." Getting snarky on them just means they'll stay and work like malcontents.
Linus's post is perfectly understandable. I don't think it shows towering ego and arrogance. We all get exasperated now and then. He's trying to be nice about it, but he just can't help himself. He's only human. It doesn't *matter* whether he's right or wrong, he let his exasperation show. When you're on the receiving end of that it comes across as disrespectful. Sometimes *trying* to express your exasperation *nicely* is even worse. It's patronizing.
One thing I learned is that people will do good work for no money before they'll do good work for no respect. And the best people won't work at all without respect.
Re:Open-Source developers are jerks (Score:4, Insightful)
I find the same behavior from programmers of closed source applications too. Any bug or question is taken personally or they run with a bad decision forever because doing otherwise would admit fault. I have the most respect for the rare developer that changes his/her stance and does the right thing in the end. Typical developers are very defensive and need a lot of ego stroking to get useful work out of them.
Re:Open-Source developers are jerks (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes is works the other way. How many times have good developers been beaten-down by inferior, more senior, co-workers who think a "code review" session is really a "watch me brilliantly rewrite your code in front of you" session?
Re:Not very responsible either (Score:5, Informative)
First of all I am very greatful for everything he did. I know he contributed a lot. Hope the handover will be more than this emotional message: "Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer care."
You'll be pleased to hear that not only is Alan helping with the handover, he's been providing some constructive criticism about the way the bug is being fixed now Linus and a few other people have turned their full attention to it.
Re:Not very responsible either (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not nothing. The TTY module has lost a very talented maintainer.
OTOH, it's definitely not the end of the world, either.
I ONCE wrote a serial driver for an RS232C port on a CP/M system. This is my only right to criticize. For such right as it gives... Alan deserves full credit for many years of irritating work with a stupid messy standard. And *I* only had to interface three devices. I think that was the project that convinced me to never again touch assembler.
*cough* (Score:5, Insightful)
Solaris :)