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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 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
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. "
Everything.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
Alan Cox announces he will maintain Slashcode: "After this, it will be bloody easy to maintain the Slashcode codebase."
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!
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.
Alan thank you for your contribution to the open source community!
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
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Actually, and bizarrely enough, there is a high level FreeBSD developer named Alan Cox too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox
I'm ready to scream bloody murder over it not being included yet.
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.
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...
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.
"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.'
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
>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.