Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough"

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.

Comments

Linus

[Enderandrew]

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

[Enderandrew]

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

[Enderandrew]

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

[dvice_null]

> I found myself pulling on a door clearly marked Push.

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.

On slashdotting...

[nweaver]

WHY can't lkml.org's mailing list retriever handle a slashdotting?

Its not like the flashcrowds are all THAT big.

Re:Interesting...

[schon]

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:Thanks

[dotgain]

Not much else to say.

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.

• The 'user' side, where you put up with limited, buggy and badly designed software, finding yourself grateful it even exists, and
• The 'dev' side, where your success is proportional to the thickness of your skin. Your willingness to sit there and listen to argue with some other twit whose age you guess at 13 over something you know isn't furthering your project one bit. Oh, and telling people who post "I'm leaving" threads on the forum how wrong they are about everything, and how little their contribution was really worth anyway.

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:So long and thanks for all the code.

[phoxix]

Actually, and bizarrely enough, there is a high level FreeBSD developer named Alan Cox too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox