How many months should he have waited for an authoritative response?

Well, Marcan should wait as long as feels right to him. As I said previously, I’m pretty sure he was already pissed off about previous R4L issues and he didn’t quit because of this alone. I want to be clear that I’m commenting solely on the expectation of a swifter response from leadership in the original email thread and not on Marcan’s decision to step down, which I can’t be the judge of.

So, I expect people in places of power to take their time when they respond publicly to issues like this, for various reasons. Eg:

• they might try to resolve things in private first (seems to be the case)
• they might want to discuss with their peers to double check their decision making and to take collective action, this is especially true if the CoC committee gets involved
• they might want to chime in when people have calmed down and they expect to be able to have meaningful conversations with them

At the very least, I would have waited to see what happens with the patches if I were in his position. The review process, which kept going in the meantime, essentially sets a timer for a decision to be made. In the end, Hellwig’s objections would either be acknowledged as blocking or they would be ignored. In any case there would have been a clear stance from the project’s leadership. It makes sense to me to wait for this inevitable outcome before making a committal decision such as stepping down.

Cristoph Hellwig’s initial message was on 2025-01-08. Marcan’s stepping down was on 2025-02-07. So no, it’s not several months; it’s barely one month. Getting in fights in mailing lists and making social media posts is not everyone’s first reaction and it is arguably not the best reaction, especially for people in places of power. It is silly for Marcan to demand everybody’s reaction to be as loud and as quick as his own.

It was very clear that the reaction was going to be no reaction.

Well, it turns out that the reaction was pretty clear not “no reaction”. That’s the reason this thread we’re talking in exists. Marcan was objectively wrong if he assumed Hellwig’s comments and nack would be accepted. Instead, Hellwig was explicitly called out for having no say on the matter and for producing “garbage arguments”.

Marcan is not the submitter. Unless I’ve missed something, the submitter is still working on the patch.

Marcan was probably fed up and was looking for a reason leave. If that’s not the case, then it’s silly for him to just quit mid-discussion, before it’s even become apparent what the reaction to Cristoph Hellwig’s behavior would be and whether his reply would even be taken into account during the review process.

Arch doesn’t require you to “read through all changelogs”. It only requires that you check the news. News posts are rare, their text is short, and not all news posts are about you needing to do something to upgrade the system. Additionally, pacman wrappers like paru check the news automatically and print them to the terminal before upgrading the system. So it’s not like you have to even remember it and open a browser to do it.

Arch is entirely about “move fast and break stuff”.

No, it’s not. None of the things that make Arch hard for newbies have to do anything with the bleeding edge aspect of Arch. Arch does not assume your use case and will leave it up to you to do stuff like edit the default configuration and enable a service. In case of errors or potential breakage you get an error or a warning and you deal with it as you see fit. These design choices have nothing to do with “moving fast”. It’s all about simplicity and a diy approach to setting up a system.

The latter is I think aiming for Linux ABI compatibility.

I had never hard of Asterinas, but this sounds like a the best approach to me. I believe alternative OS’s need to act as (near) drop-in replacements if they want to be used as daily drivers. ABI-incompatible alternatives might be fine for narrower use cases, but most people wouldn’t even try out a desktop OS that doesn’t support most of the hardware and software they already use.

I’m not sure why they feel it’s Linus’ responsibility to make Rust happen in the kernel.

That’s not what’s being said here, as far as I can tell. Linus is not expected to somehow “make Rust happen”. But as a leader, he is expected to call out maintainers who block the R4L project and harass its members just because they feel like it. Christoph Hellwig’s behavior should not be allowed.

I’m not saying Marcan is necessarily correct, to be clear. It might well be that Linus chose to handle the issue in a quieter way. We can’t know whether Linus was planning on some kind of action that didn’t involve him jumping into the middle of the mailing list fight, eg contacting Christoph Hellwig privately. I’m merely pointing out that maybe you misunderstood what Marcan is saying.

Or fork it and make a Rust Linux with blackjack and hookers, and boy, will everyone left behind feel silly that they didn’t jump on the bandwagon.

That’s what they’re doing. But if you read the entire post carefully, he explains why maintaining a fork without eventually upstreaming it is problematic. And it’s not like they’re forcing their dream on the linux project, because the discussions have already been had and rust has officially been accepted into the kernel. So in the wider context, this is about individual maintainers causing friction against an agreed-upon project they don’t like.

Yeah, that section is bad.

For one, it’s has classic vibe “if you want to keep the nazis out, you’re the one who’s exclusionary”.

But also, how is refusing to engage on a platform “shutting out a significant portion of [the] community”? That sounds backwards to me. Blocking people from engaging with Debian on its own platforms would be shutting them out. The implication in the article is that Debian is obligated to be unconditionally present on every social platform its users might be on.