I admire Kent’s drive to create something good, but I’m disappointed to see that he still hasn’t learned to tread lightly in shared spaces. From what I’ve seen of the Bcachefs story, Linus has been responding appropriately to his behavior.
Sigh… maybe a few more trips around the sun will help.
This is actually kind of tame by Kent’s standards.
It’s a shame honestly. He seems smart but he doesn’t seem to realize that the linux kernel is not just for his “customers.” It’s literally for everyone. He seems to think he can make whatever changes and it’ll be fine (perhaps it will be) but doesn’t understand that the people using bcachefs are a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of overall Linux users who need stability in the kernel.
That and anyone using bcachefs 1) probably shouldn’t be holding so much data on it given how it changes and 2) should be able to build a kernel with the patches if needed because it’s experimental and…if you’re doing that you should know what you’re doing.
Writing good code does not excuse you from being an arsehole. I’m glad most of the FOSS community has moved on from sheer meritocracy. In the end such behaviour will always also affect the software.
Or at least the merit part of meritocracy being an overall gain for society/foss space (same thing), not individual isolated achievements/products.
With that mindset of overall benefits you do move on from strict meritocracy bcs everything is a group effort, of not just direct contributors (but obviously mostly of them) but ultimately of all stakeholders (users too).
We all need to grow, and I think, given reasonable opportuneness, we do.
Reading Kents unhinged messages, that seemed inevitable in hindsight.
Kent’s acting like this is a production filesystem and users need to have his fixes RFN. Anyone using bcachefs in anger needs their head examined. They should expect it to blow up completely, and they can pick up the pieces.
Types of headache #4: Kent.
As expected. I like bcachefs and the features it already has, but switched away because of the drama/instability.
