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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.
Thanks for all the hard work. Good luck to the next maintainer. Not much else to say.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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!"
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?
WHY can't lkml.org's mailing list retriever handle a slashdotting?
Its not like the flashcrowds are all THAT big.
Test your net with Netalyzr
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
How long does a bear have to be? Is it proportional to long cat?
http://xkcd.com/323/
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Time for all to give Alan a sound round of applause and thanks! The TTY subsystem is a gem thanks to his work.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"stern criticism" -> link 1
"decided to walk away" -> link 2
"quite clear that he is serious" -> link 3
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Are we talking tail-to-nose or is that a phalic reference? OTOH, how you would know your bear's penis length is something that should probably go unsaid.
This could have been handled much better via a private message (or phone call) than in a public forum.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Alan Cox announces he will maintain Slashcode: "After this, it will be bloody easy to maintain the Slashcode codebase."
No, this pretty much *is* a definition of a "benevolent dictatorship".
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
Where can we find another hacker that looks like a yeTTY?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
...about the details of this argument? I know Linus might not be the easiest person to work with, but he seems to make some sense here.
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?
Kriston
Alan thank you for your contribution to the open source community!
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
"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...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
The true point of contention? Emacs vs. Vi. Loons.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Linus: Hey Alan finger my tty
Alan: No Way! i quit!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
"Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer
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.
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.
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.
Pirate Party UK
Seriously? KDESU is broken, in the first place.
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=kdesu
To be fair, "I no longer care" is shorthand for the closely related "I no longer care enough to put up with the criticism" which is just a statement of cost/benefit analysis. He does care, but not enough to keep going, and that roughly approximates "I don't care".
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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"?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
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.
Beetle B.
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.
He who has no
Solaris :)
you had me at #!
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Once we camped out near a river, in known bear territory somewhere in central California. We hadn't seen any bear tracks, but put our food up in a nearby tree anyway (because that's just what you do in bear territory).
At around 2 AM that night, we awoke to hear the sound of large animals moving in our campsite, accompanied by the rustling of what sounded very much like our bear bag. Getting a fire going as quickly as possible (meaning, a liter of white gas poured onto the nearest thing that looked like wood and then set ablaze), we didn't find a bear. We found a team of TWO bears attacking our bear bag.
The big one climbed up the trunk of the tree, just under the branch from which we'd hung the bag. The little one, presumably a cub of the big one, had climbed out on the branch, and in a series of small steps, had pulled the bag along the branch with one arm toward the larger bear, who could now reach it from her spot on the trunk, and who was shredding the bag to bits as all our food dropped out. The fire, of course, chased the thieving duo away after a couple of minutes, and they thankfully only got away with some sausages and most of a bottle of pancake syrup.
Of course, what we hadn't noticed was that this tree had basically no leaves or branches or bark on it anywhere. Based on the number of large scratches and claw marks all over the tree, we surmised that we weren't the first ones to try to hang our food from this tree, which was essentially a food collection station operated by the bears to tax any humans foolish enough to camp there.
The damn bears are smarter than you'd think.
I'm ready to scream bloody murder over it not being included yet.
Ignore my post (can I mod myself down ??) .... He has left tty maintainer, but is still posting on the kernel mailing list. I hope he re-considers talent like his is rare .
"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
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".
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...
far more often than technical challenges. This incident provides an enlightening view into Linux development. Working for someone with the social skills of a 13 year old girl, who doesn't actually pay you, never ends well.
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
.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> why isn't Reiser 4 in the damn kernel already?
Vendor lock-in.
>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.