Re: On community influencing (was Re: [PATCH v8 2/2] rust: add dma coherent allocator abstraction.)

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Sat, Feb 08, 2025 at 03:02:11AM +0900, Hector Martin wrote:
> The centralization concern is valid, but there are technical solutions
> to this, such as forge federation. 

Unfortunately, forge federation is really only between Forgejo instances and
is still pretty nascent, afaict. The most promising development in
decentralized forges that I've seen is Radicle, but I'm yet to try it again
ever since they got collectively drunk on bitcoin coolaid a few years ago.

> Meanwhile, for better or worse, much of Linux infra *is* centralized -
> for example, the mailing lists themselves, and a lot of the Git hosting.

Yes, but it's at least resilient. If someone knocks out vger.kernel.org,
kernel development will still continue because maintainers are still cc'd
directly via email, and email is still the only widely adopted federated
platform that we have, with nothing else coming anywhere close.

> At the end of the day, I do not believe a theoretical breakdown of Linux
> infra would be a major long-term setback to Linux kernel development.

We know it's the case when kernel.org went off the air for months in 2011. :)
Let's keep it that way!

> But I'm afraid you'll find much if not most of the true opposition to
> forges is not technical, it is philosophical or preference-based (even
> though it may be presented as technical opposition, sometimes to
> intentionally mislead). This is, in fact, quite a mirror of the R4L
> situation, where technical arguments ("show me you can write a real
> driver") quickly lead to non-technical arguments when solutions are
> proposed ("it's cancer").
> 
> I actually considered moving soc/apple development to a forge personally
> in the near future (obviously not my call to make any more), and I was
> fully expecting a pile of pushback, "because that's not how we do things
> here". Who knows, I might have gotten a "fuck you, either you accept
> email patches or I remove you from MAINTAINTERS" from Linus.

It is my goal to be able to give subsystems a way to use forges without it
impacting how they interact with upstream or handle tree-wide changes. That
is, once I'm done moving things from one Benevolent Company to another.

> All that said, thanks for b4. I might have given up much earlier, not
> due to flamewars but due to exhaustion with poor tooling, if it didn't
> exist.

I'm happy to hear that.

Best wishes,
-K