Bureaucracies run on process. You call that "politics", but (when arguing with programmers) I call it code. The Linux kernel project is a bureaucracy.
> citation needed
I'm sure you're familiar with "separation of concerns" in programming: it's the same principle. My experience of bureaucracies is experience, but I'm sure most good books on the topic will have a paragraph or chapter on this.
> bcachefs was being singled out because he and the other maintainers involved had no real interest in the end goal of getting a stable, reliable, trustworthy modern filesystem.
I imagine they would dispute that.
> No exceptions were needed or required,
I know that Linus Torvalds would dispute that. In this HN thread and elsewhere, you've made good arguments that treating your approach as an exception is not warranted, and that your approach is better, but you surely aren't claiming that your approach is the usual approach for kernel development?
> undermining me as maintainer
Part of the job is dealing with Linus Torvalds. You're not good at that. It would make sense for you to focus on architecture, programming, making bcachefs great, and to let someone else deal with submitting patches to the kernel, or arguing those technical arguments where you're right, but aren't getting listened to.
People are "more concerned with politics" than with engineering concerns because the problem is not with your engineering.
> bcachefs has always had one of the better track records at avoiding regressions and quickly handling them when they do get through
That's not relevant. I know that you don't see that it's not relevant: that's why I'm saying it's not relevant.
> have you been getting your background from youtube commentators?
No, but I'm used to disputes of this nature, and I'm used to dealing with unreasonable people. You believe that others are being unreasonable, but you're not following an effective strategy for dealing with unreasonable people. I am attempting to give advice, because I want bcachefs in the kernel, and I haven't a hope of changing Linus Torvalds' mind, but I have half a hope of changing yours.
Rule one of dealing with unreasonable people is to pick your battles. How many times have I said "dispute" or "argument" in this comment? How many times have these been worthy disputes? Even if I've completely mischaracterised the overall situation, surely you can't claim that every argument you've had on the LKML or in LWN comments has been worth bcachefs being removed from the kernel.
Look, it wasn't just this one thing. There had been entirely too many arguments over bugfixes, with the sole justification on Linus's end being "it's experimental garbage that no one should be using".
I can't ship and support a filesystem under those circumstances.
The "support" angle is one you and a lot of other people are missing. Supporting it is critical to stabilizing, and we can't close the loop with users if we can't ship bugfixes.
Given the past history with btrfs, this is of primary concern.
You've been looking for a compromise position, and that's understandable, but sometimes the only reasonable compromise is "less stupidity, or we go our separate ways".
The breaking point was, in the private maintainer thread, a page and a half rant from Linus on how he doesn't trust my judgement, and then immediately after that another rant on how - supposedly - everyone in the kernel community hates me and wants me gone.
Not joking. You can go over everything I've ever said on LKML, including the CoC incident, and nothing rises to that level. I really just want to be done with that sort of toxicity.
I know you and a lot of other people wanted bcachefs to be upstream, and it's not an ideal situation, but there are limits to what I'm willing to put up with.
Now, we just need to be looking forward. The DKMS transition has been going smoothly, more people are getting involved, everyone's fully committed to making this work and I still have my funding.
It's going to be ok, we don't need to have everything riding on making it work with the kernel community.
And now, you guys don't have to worry about me burning out on the kernel community and losing my last vestiges of sanity and going off to live in the mountains and herd goats :)
> citation needed
I'm sure you're familiar with "separation of concerns" in programming: it's the same principle. My experience of bureaucracies is experience, but I'm sure most good books on the topic will have a paragraph or chapter on this.
> bcachefs was being singled out because he and the other maintainers involved had no real interest in the end goal of getting a stable, reliable, trustworthy modern filesystem.
I imagine they would dispute that.
> No exceptions were needed or required,
I know that Linus Torvalds would dispute that. In this HN thread and elsewhere, you've made good arguments that treating your approach as an exception is not warranted, and that your approach is better, but you surely aren't claiming that your approach is the usual approach for kernel development?
> undermining me as maintainer
Part of the job is dealing with Linus Torvalds. You're not good at that. It would make sense for you to focus on architecture, programming, making bcachefs great, and to let someone else deal with submitting patches to the kernel, or arguing those technical arguments where you're right, but aren't getting listened to.
People are "more concerned with politics" than with engineering concerns because the problem is not with your engineering.
> bcachefs has always had one of the better track records at avoiding regressions and quickly handling them when they do get through
That's not relevant. I know that you don't see that it's not relevant: that's why I'm saying it's not relevant.
> have you been getting your background from youtube commentators?
No, but I'm used to disputes of this nature, and I'm used to dealing with unreasonable people. You believe that others are being unreasonable, but you're not following an effective strategy for dealing with unreasonable people. I am attempting to give advice, because I want bcachefs in the kernel, and I haven't a hope of changing Linus Torvalds' mind, but I have half a hope of changing yours.
Rule one of dealing with unreasonable people is to pick your battles. How many times have I said "dispute" or "argument" in this comment? How many times have these been worthy disputes? Even if I've completely mischaracterised the overall situation, surely you can't claim that every argument you've had on the LKML or in LWN comments has been worth bcachefs being removed from the kernel.