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Linus Torvalds Suspends Key Linux Developer
alphadogg writes: "An argument between developers of some of the most basic parts of Linux turned heated this week, resulting in a prominent Red Hat employee and code contributor being banned from working on the Linux kernel. Kay Sievers, a well-known open-source software engineer, is a key developer of systemd, a system management framework for Linux-based operating systems. Systemd is currently used by several prominent Linux distributions, including two of the most prominent enterprise distros, Red Hat and SUSE. It was recently announced that Ubuntu would adopt systemd in future versions as well. Sievers was banned by kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds on Wednesday for failing to address an issue that caused systemd to interact with the Linux kernel in negative ways."
And this is good.
Quote from the Linus email:
Kay - one more time: you caused the problem, you need to fix it. None of this "I can do whatever I want, others have to clean up after me" crap.
Being Kay a Red Hat paid developer, perhaps it's not his entirely fault what's happening. But it's his name on the table, so it's his responsability nevertheless.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
his complaint about systemd has been widely echoed in the Linux world, with prominent contributors like Ingo Molnar, slamming the “excessively passive/aggressive” attitude of the project’s maintainers.
If you ignore requests you piss people off. Sounds like banning the guy was the right thing to do.
Time for that boy to move along and let someone with fresh ideas take over.
- oh yeah, fresh ideas like: "you didn't build that".
Fresh ideas like: "the consumer created those jobs".
Fresh ideas like: "all responsibility is shared".
----
I think Linus is 100% spot on with his comment:
Key, I'm f*cking tired of the fact that you don't fix problems in the ....
code *you* write, so that the kernel then has to work around the
problems you cause.
But I'm not willing to merge something where the maintainer is known to not care about bugs and regressions and then forces people in other projects to fix their project. Because I am *not* willing to take patches from people who don't clean up after their problems, and don't admit that it's their problem to fix.
Kay - one more time: you caused the problem, you need to fix it. None of this "I can do whatever I want, others have to clean up after me" crap. .....
Linus
You can't handle the truth.
I would have gotten first post if I wasn't running both the base kernel’s debugging routine and that of systemd.
"I'm not accepting any patches until you fix your bugs" is hardly suspending someone, it's re-focusing them. This is an important part in any software project, and Linus is doing it well here. There's no ambiguity or hyperbole, just straightforward communication identifying issues and prompting action to correct them.
"Start fixing your shit" isn't even remotely the same thing as "stop doing things".
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Linus just talks like a sailor.
Arrh, I dun think so me shiverin' matey!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I run Linux as my primary OS on my home PC.
It has dual boot with Win7 (rarely used) and VirtualBox with WinXP (used somewhat often for a couple of programs).
Debian Sid @ home on my laptop & desktop
CentOS 5/6 @ work on my cluster/desktop
Android on my phone & tablet
Synology @ home for storage, so basically Linux there, too...
OpenWRT on my wireless routers (yes, plural) @ home, so Linux there *too*.
I guess you could say I run Linux...
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
First the idea of "Suspending" a kernel developer is inane. Kernel developers don't work for Linus. Anyone can fork the kernel and work on his own version of it. Furthermore, Kay can write code that other people audit, modify and submit further.
Secondly, it's not an 'indefinite, unconditional ban' as suggested by the summary. Here's the specific line from Linus' email:
Greg - just for your information, I will *not* be merging any code
from Kay into the kernel until this constant pattern is fixed.
In other words he might start accepting patches from him if he changed his style of operating.
Not quite. From TFE:
Greg - just for your information, I will *not* be merging any code from Kay into the kernel until this constant pattern is fixed.
More like "Correct your previous assignments until you can turn in more assignments."
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
From the previous message in the thread, to which Linus was reacting:
It has come to our attention that a system running a specific user
space init program will not boot if you add "debug" to the kernel
command line. What happens is that the user space tool parses the
kernel command line, and if it sees "debug" it will spit out so much
information that the system fails to boot. This basically renders the
"debug" option for the kernel useless.
This bug has been reported to the developers of said tool
here:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/s...
The response is:
"Generic terms are generic, not the first user owns them."
That is, the "debug" statement on the *kernel* command line is not
owned by the kernel just because it was the first user of it, and
they refuse to fix their bug.
I don't care if Kay wrote "Jesus 2.0". He broke kernel debugging for all development and responded to this with arrogant platitudes based on architecture principle, rather than join with cooperative interest to seek a solution.
Linus was restrained, in response to such a "community contributor". This is the Linux kernel, not Oxford dons, vying for college chairs.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Kay is either an arrogant asshat or an aspberger's victim. Either way, he hasn't demonstrated an interest in collaborating on a solution for the whole forest, over the pure vision of his one, true tree.
Without Linus, Linux is doomed.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Here is the actual bug and arguement: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/s...
Greg - just for your information, I will *not* be merging any code from Kay into the kernel until this constant pattern is fixed.
I currently run openSUSE for its relatively up-to-date programs, working wireless drivers (especially for my previous system with a POS Broadcom chip), etc. I now have a system with slightly more Linux-friendly drivers (Intel wireless), I just have to wait for the major distros to support it because it's so new (Debian Testing supposedly does, I just don't want to run Testing...). I might then switch to another distro, but I'm staying with Linux. I primarily use the i3 window manager, except on occasion when I want to play a game on Steam (which doesn't seem to get along too well with i3, so I temporarily switch to KDE).
Ironically, after "upgrading" from the crap that is Windows 8 that the laptop came with to Windows 8.1, the damn operating system can't even boot half the time without locking up. Not that big of a deal, since I rarely need it... but god damn, does it get annoying when I would like to reboot into it for whatever reason. Even worse is when I spend 5 reboots and 15 minutes just to spend 2 or 3 minutes actually doing something in the OS.
I don't get why anyone runs Windows.
Because it works just fine and it is what most people are familiar with? Plus out-of-the-box support for things like games and a wide array of mainstream consumer software.
I don't really get why anyone can be puzzled as to how Windows is a popular OS.
A kid'll use Ubuntu, too.
Wouldn't you?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
who runs Linux these days?
Linux is 25 years old now. You don't run it, you walk it slowly with a leash and let it have a pee on the front lawn.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
People run windows, because, ummm, maybe it has software that is usable?
Adobe apps for instance. Yes, I could run them on an overpriced mac, that is an option, if I do not mind being locked into the most obviously nefarious corporate slime in existence.
The fact that you don't understand this, means you probably are very limited in your understanding of how people use computers in general. That takes nothing away from your technical skills. Just wouldnt put you in charge of I.T. at a company bigger than say, 2.
Look, windows is still at over 80% market share. You are flat out ignoring reality when you say you dont get why anyone runs windows. It does not make you look smart, I'm sure that was what you were trying to accomplish.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
The message to which Linus responds is also interesting:
Short story:
The systemd guy uses the debug keyword on kernel command line to spool a huge log - which can hang the boot process, and that is the problem.
Then the same guy claims that the debug keyword is generic so it can't be reserved by the kernel, even if it's been used first by it since a long time...
I can say that Linus is right there, for sure. He's maybe too kind...
Linus is generally fair from what I can tell, and does not except himself from criticism. In that very thread:
Yeah, what Andrew said. My suggestion of per-task or per-cred is
obviously moronic in comparison.
Linus "hangs head in shame" Torvalds
Someone proposed a better idea and Linus immediately admits his idea was worse and moves on. That was also one of Steve Jobs' greatest talents, even though it's in a completely different sphere. He originally said "no" to iPods for Windows and the iOS app store. People presented their case and he changed his mind.
We should all be so willing to admit when someone else has a better idea or we were wrong.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
because the bulk of the software i use isnt available on linux. because the games i like arent available on linux. because it works pretty much out of the box for me. because my clients need me to develop software for windows and thats much easier to do in windows. because much of the peripheral hardware i use is only available for windows (or is a giant pain to get running anywhere else. and, yes, i have tried). and lastly, there is no incentive for me to move away from windows.
if linux is what you prefer or what works best for you, thats wonderful and im very happy for you. windows is what i prefer and works best for me.
They just aren't accepting code from him until he fixes that issue. The summary makes it sound much more dramtic than it really is.
I sometimes run Linux and sometimes run Windows. Why? Because it's nice for my OS to piss me off in different ways instead of always the same ways. :-)
A pirated copy of Win7.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
This story somehow reminds me of the Seinfeld Spongeworthy episode. Elaine finds out that the contraceptive sponge is no longer manufactured so she hoards them and then chooses her lovers based on the fact of whether or not she thinks they're Spongeworthy. I think in this case Linus doesn't have enough sponges left to waste.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
For those of us lacking in perspective on how Fun! kernel debugging is, here is a voice from the MS side of things. Dangerous curveballs ahead.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf
I really and truly respect that.
I have had more than enough experience in dealing with "this is how I do it!" developers. We're talking about writing code -- a set of instructions to accomplish things usually performed by an electronic machine. Things definitely become complex and even confusing at times, but it's NOT MAGIC. And when people need to work with developers and developers with developers and all that, I have run short on patience where some developers believe they are the thing and not the project or the community affected by the project.
To me, the community which uses the project or is affected by the project is the thing. If you write for results, then you agree. If you write to make yourself proud? You're just a bit too self-absorbed. (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being happy and proud of your work, but what you want should never be the thing.)
I just wish Linus would go kick some GNOME team ass and share some wisdom with GIMP developers as well.
Exactly. I would probably be using it too if I had come to computers late. Back in the 80's when I wanted to upgrade from my Commodore 128 I looked at the PC clones and compared them to the Commodore Amiga and it was no question at all for me. The clones were a fucking joke. Once Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould decided to bankrupt Commodore and then Win 95 came out the only other active system was Apple which was a joke at that time. Everyone was buying Win 95 like it was going out of style. Later when I wanted new hardware I looked at Windows and went "ugh!" and then read about Linux. I bought a dual pentium II server and installed Linux on it in '99 and never looked back. I've never actually used windows much outside of work but I can see why people that never used anything else use it. You can buy anything at all for it. If it's all you ever used you wouldn't know that it sucks.
For those of us lacking in perspective on how Fun! kernel debugging is, here is a voice from the MS side of things. Dangerous curveballs ahead.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf
OK. That was GREAT!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
His problem is that he believes he is right in all things and has a huge ego.
Here's the thing: in this case, Linus is definitely right, and Kay is definitely being dickish. Namespacing the switch (checking for "systemd.debug" instead of just "debug") would take all of 5 minutes and would solve the problem, the only inconvenience would be to the systemd developers who would need 8 (!) extra characters on their kernel command lines. Acceptance of systemd is already lower than it should be if everyone judged it purely on the merits, and this kind of thing does not help at all.
Let's take a step back and consider what systemd has given us compared to what we had before.
Before systemd, configuring what gets started on Linux systems was standard across all distributions, dating back to before 1995, when I started developing software with Linux. There was /etc/rc.d/init.d or in some cases /etc/init.d and in most cases there were links in rc1.d, rc2.d, rc3.d, etc. It was that simple. Nothing ever broke.
With systemd, a solution in search of a problem, everything changed. Now you have all of these directory hierarchies and countless old bugs that take years to get resolved. For example, "network restart" was broken in Fedora for ages for a machine of mine with one DHCP Ethernet interface and two static Ethernet interfaces (with nothing fancy like wireless). "network restart" fails on a variety of machines I have access to; forget about "network reload." ifcfg-eth0 and the like are simple things, some of the most basic boot-related operations. I've tried to open bugs but the problem seems to be buried somewhere in the guts of systemd.
I've had systems rendered unbootable during upgrades because of silent failures trying to make a good initrd. It's too complex to get everything right with systemd. For a long, long time when the boot scripts died with systemd there was no obvious way to see any errors. Recently they added some more debugging output suggesting that you use journalctl. Why didn't they tell us about that earlier? The reason? No documentation. They wrote an entirely new way to boot the system but kept the design in their heads. Maybe, many years later, there is some scant documentation available (except for that one old useless design document justifying systemd's existence that everyone has read). Of course, nobody writes man pages anymore but they were sure to remove the man pages for the old boot system.
So what new things does systemd give us? Pretty much nothing except for bugs. Maybe there are a few oddball use cases like booting off of weird media, but most people today boot off of a fixed hard drive that doesn't change in years. 19 years later it might be an SSD, but that is the same use case.
I currently run software on Linux, Windows and OS X simultaneously on a single machine. It's true: the issue is not about the best OS but choosing the best tools regardless. The whole question of which OS is the best is so 90s. There really are no borders these days.
The same install of XP, minus the annoying constant stream of patches?
Unless you're talking about large business, then they'll be (and are) switching to Win7.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Linus is providing that which is severely lacking in open source projects. Discipline. No you don't get to do whatever you want neither is there any excuse for breaking shit. Without people like Linus ABI back compat would have been shattered into little bits by now.
That's a feature, not a bug.
One thing you can't say about him - that he's slow to act on bugs...
Rethinking email
As far as I can tell using OSX is the primary sign of being a pretentious asshole. But I don't go around calling pretentious assholes what they are. Because I am, you know, respectful?
Who cares about systemd anyway? Slackware user here...
The "perhaps less Unix like" part is funny:
http://forums.scotsnewsletter....
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
At best you are stupid. At worst (and that I expect), you are a paid shill of the US intelligence community. What you claim is totally disconnected from reality and a nice example of disinformation tactics.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I used to work with a guy who was a MS kernel hacker. He knew the debugger setup in all it's arcanity backwards and forwards, and had a lot of code knowledge there too, despite never working at MS. It was great fun to watch IT try to manage his machine through normal tools (to push updates and reboots and whatnot). He was having none of that, but he wasn't going to pick a fight with IT, instead he just ensured that the IT client tools were kept happy, that the kernel always told them what they needed to hear.
Never pick a geek-fight on a machine that your opponent has a kernel debugger attached to. Ahh, old-school hacking. How I miss the art.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
People run windows, because, ummm, maybe it has software that is usable?
Ah! So you're saying that its applications that people use computers for, not OSs! I agree. You now must realize that it costs nothing extra to the developers to select a cross platform development toolchain instead of a platform specific one which may tie them to OSs that have uncertain futures. AND if they go "cross platform or bust" then they get free money via increased market share.
Unfortunately if their codebase started out with a vendor-lock-in solution then their products will be hard to "port". However, it takes me only a single "git pull && make" to port my changes from my application's GNU/Linux development environment to GNU/BSD, GNU/Mac or GNU/Windows, and indeed with my cross complier toolchain that single command builds all targets. The uniform userspace reduces changes required of my build system and code. LLVM is another option, but I've had this build setup prior to even mingw, and see no real benefit to change as my C/C++ platform abstraction layer allows me to deploy as even JAVA bytecode with GCC. In my continuous build-test-deploy setups recompiles are done periodically as I push changes to the server and any build errors appear on a webpage in my issue tracker detecting regressions across all platforms without me doing anything extra than a single "git push".
So, really, it is not Windows that keeps people on Windows, it is application developers who haven't yet been sufficiently pressured by their publishers into increasing their install base.
means you probably are very limited in your understanding of how people use computers in general.
Most people use the OS that's installed for them for the lifetime of the hardware, and use the applications available for it. Most people select the hardware with the OS that supports the applications they want to run. When XP came out I was selling PCs and the #1 question asked was "Can I install $APPLICATION on it?", this is still the prime question in the mind of the consumer: What apps can it run?
MS is shooting themselves in the foot with the whole Metro App Store thing. That's another vendor lock-in strategy. I've seen plenty of devs now reconsidering their codebase and dev platform and asking, "Well, I don't want to lose W7 installbase, and if I'm going to put in an abstraction layer for W7 and Win8 UI Style API, then I might as well spend a little more effort to go full cross platform, reach for additional market share, and no longer be tied to W8."
Not saying your comment is wrong, I'm just saying it won't be right for very much longer. It's 2014, the OS is irrelevant. It's merely a means for the platform abstraction layer to talk to the underlying hardware. Hell, my meta-language compiler has even made most languages irrelevant to me, they are just interfaces to the OS for re-implementation of the platform abstraction layer's "runtime". In 18 months I will have my entire codebase cross compiling against Android and even iOS.
Another response from Linus...
http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/...
As noted, it wasn't Linus that started the blow-up. It got to this point because Sievers was ignoring more professional, less blunt instructions about it. And yes I'd rather deal with Linus. Because if I pulled the kind of crap Sievers had I'd've expected to have my manager drop my final paycheck on my desk and tell me I had 5 minutes to pack my things and the nice gentlemen from Security would be escorting me out of the building, and no I wouldn't be receiving a separation package because I was being terminated for gross incompetence. I'd rather deal with a manager who'll chew an incompetent developer out for being incompetent, as opposed to one who'll just send off iteration after iteration of "professional" memos about the developer having a problem and never actually do anything about the problem. At least with Linus I could be pretty sure I knew exactly where I stood with him.
Then again, I've written code that did exactly the same thing Sievers' code did. But I did what Sievers should have done in the first place, hung it off on it's own specific enable flag so it couldn't be turned on inadvertently, because I knew it was going to bring the system to it's knees and that was something that should never be able to happen as a side-effect of something else.
Systemd replaces init and is the first daemon to start up in user space during boot and the last daemon to shut down. When its developer sees nothing wrong with breaking the kernel debug during boot merely because its developer feels that he's entitled to use the same parameter name and the kernel boot be damned, you REALLY have to wonder about the wisdom of using systemd.
Let me put it this way: when I read Linus messages, I see a human behind them that believes what he is saying. It feels genuine and real. The alternative sometimes sounds like a prepared speech from somebody who may or may not care. Like a politician.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Umm...who would fire Linus? He's in charge.
Personally, the more of these articles attacking his dealing with a situation in a way which seems reasonable to me from a programming project perspective appear, the more faith I have in his leadership.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Correct, such people must have missed things like Dmitry Sklyarov showing that a breakfast cereal code wheel style letter substitution method was used by Adobe as "encryption". Julius Caesar famously wrote a description of that method, that's how old and well know it is.
OSS software in that league would get laughed at and not taken seriously at all.