Young folks: Please can we contribute using modern git-based workflow rather than email?
Old farts: No.
👶: OK, but can we at least use modern memory-safe languages?
👴: Also no.
👶: Perhaps we could modernise our language & attitudes to be more inclusive?
👴: LOL! No.
👶: Could we at least consider addressing some long-standing community issues?
👴: What part of "no" are you having trouble understanding?
⏳ ⌛
👴: Why aren't there any new people contributing to our project? Truly a mystery. 🙃
Turns out, Bob Dylan has written a song especially for all the old farts clogging up my replies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90WD_ats6eE
I wonder if they'll ever realise that it is now aimed at them?
@Edent Please can we use modern build tools like cmake, ninja, etc etc
Hell no. Plain `make` does the job easily for 90% of projects. Rtfm and learn how to use it before you go pushing for the latest flavor of the month.
Joining an existing project requires learning how it already works. You don't get to just jump in and imnediately request every current developer change all of their established procedures to accommodate you. That won't fly, anywhere in the world.
@hyc @soviut @Edent Howard, you've accidentally entered this discussion without understanding that this is a subtoot of a particularly venomous exchange going on in the linux community right now that has nothing to do with makefiles or build scripts.
You .. might have a better reception in this thread if you take a moment to look at the resignations of Hector Marcan and Karol Herbst so that you understand the context well enough to formulate an informed comment.
@hyc @Edent If a project is having trouble attracting new talent, then something IS broken and DOES need fixing. If you are unable to maintain a decent DX in your project, that's an important aspect that's broken.
Just because the "old farts" are used to the hostile environment doesn't mean the environment isn't hostile.
Senior maintainers need to be introspective, identify their negatives and correct them. Otherwise they risk their projects being ignored to death.
@hyc @Edent Nobody said it's retooling to accommodate every newcomer and you know that; don't be disingenuous.
It's about staying reasonably current so that stuff people are learning in school, in bootcamps and online in the last decade is actually applicable. Otherwise all that talent slips by as they go towards more nimble projects.
Keeping a toolchain reasonably up to date is NOT a full time job and you know that too. It isn't even something you need to do; let the new blood who want it handle it for you.
@hyc @Edent what makes Make "plain" and cmake or ninja "flavor of the month", aside from your familiarity bias?
If you are starting software development from scratch, ninja or meson or cmake can make a lot more sense to you than gnu make.
cmake has existed since 2000 (and been used by e.g. kde since 2006), ninja has existed since 2012 - that's 13 years - and meson has existed since 2013; meson/ninja are used for such minor projects as GNOME and Chrome.
perhaps rethink your "month" definition.
@Edent I presume some of this alludes to the Rust vs C war currently on going? As some people have already pointed out: a dual language kernel isn’t a good idea. I’d be inclined to agree since being *really* good at two very different languages is a big ask in terms of cognitive load. I’d also suggest that kernels are VERY low-level and C is pretty good for that. I do understand that there are sections of kernel where it’s more about conventional programming and Rust/memory safety could help.
BUT I think overall trying to pitch this as Old people vs Young people is not the whole picture.
I worked on a product that touched Windows 95/NT drivers in my very first job and was horrified to learn that multiple compiler and assembler tools were needed - I was told this was down to different teams using their preferred tools.
I honestly think the Linux kernel should stick to C, Make, etc. fragmentation is very very bad and likely serves competitors more than the Linux ecosystem
@tmcfarlane @Edent @michiel The “GitHub workflow” might not be the best (example: https://mitchellh.com/writing/github-changesetsbut), but having to setup a MUA to contribute is definitely worse.
Also, this is what people are used to. 100% of the projects I use and contribute to get their contributions through Merge/Pull Requests.
@Edent the replies are fascinating in how they prove the point and missed it.
A fascinating lack of ability to self analyse
@Edent do you have data to back up the claim that those are the reasons that people who could be contributing, are choosing not to?
Because I would like to contribute and none of those reasons apply to me. #linux
The thing I want is actually good documentation that I can read to get me where I can be effective. And speedy replies.
@bmaxv You know, it’s perfectly possible for a development process to suffer from multiple issues at the same time. In fact, I’d say that better documentation might have been possible if new contributors weren’t burning out as quickly. People who have lived this code for decades don’t need documentation, but newcomers figuring things out tend to write their findings down.
@uecker @maco
I think sarcasm is the only sane response at this point.
USENET failed for the same reason IRC failed. Stick-in-the-muds who refused to adapt to what new users actually wanted.
I wrote a bit about it here https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/06/why-did-usenet-fail/
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with people in another country, downloading wallpapers, and uploading my poor attempts at…
@uecker but they *didn't*! That's the whole point!
Every time someone wanted to make a change to USENET, grumpy fogies started blathering about Eternal September and AOL lUsers.
Do you see what happened? New people went somewhere friendlier, more responsive to their needs, and with a gentler learning curve.
Same thing happens to lots of open source projects. Nerds dismissing user experience as something useless.
UX is *everything*.
@uecker I'm sorry, but you're wrong.
I was shouted at for using a client which top-posted, I was chased away for wanting to use HTML in my messages, and PLONKed when I asked people to reign in the sexism.
You can't blame any of that on companies.
They gave people what they wanted - a slick UI and a smooth experience.
All the while, fossils were insisting on ASCII supremacy and scoffing at kids who wanted to use emoji.
They were dinosaurs who refused to adapt.
See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/the-commons-weve-enclosed/
I, unironically, love Reddit. But it's just USENET with a better UI, and a few moderation improvements. Most days I use DropBox. But it's just FTP, but a bit easier to use and automate. I waste a lot of time on Slack. When I explain it to old-school nerds, I say it's IRC - but developed by someone who gives a damn about user experience. Most people in the world don't have access to WWW. Instead, they use Facebook which gives them a much simpler way to post photos and share their thoughts. It …
@uecker because it is the same thing.
People don't want to work in a toxic environment, I think we can both agree on that.
Yet, even recently, you saw big projects which tolerated sexist, racist, and homophobic language.
Would you go and volunteer to work on an open source project with that sort of community?
Would you say "well, I guess I have to change the way I communicate with people in order to participate"?
No. You'd go and do something else.
@uecker @Di4na @Edent The problem you're having is that you think this thread is about you, and that your individual choices and tastes disprove anything being said about visible trends.
Which is exactly the whole point: when project maintainers center themselves, all they will end up with is themselves.
@uecker why would I want to volunteer to work in an environment where my technical choices were mocked and belittled?
Project want to attract newbies.
Newbies want to work in a modern way.
Project aggressively tells newbies to use punch cards and COBOL or GTFO.
Newbies go off to somewhere more welcoming.
Project dies a slow death.
The end.
The enshittification of the internet wasn't inevitable. The old, good internet gave way to the enshitternet because we let our bosses enshittify it. We took ...
@corbet @Edent On the contributor numbers, obviously hard to consider the counterfactual but ~1000 new contributors per year sounds very small compared to the size of the codebase, and the very limited turnover of lieutenants suggests they aren’t progressing very far.
Do we have data on how many of those folks actually remain active? Wikipedia has done a lot of work to define and measure new editor retention and it’d be interesting to see some of that borrowed.
Not quite...
There are methods for maintaining dual language codebases like this. The rust folks don't want to follow those method and would rather steamroll the whole process. IMO they were correct to push back... happy to chat more indepth on this one.
"steamrolling" being a strong term.
More they were pushing for code where it wasn't wanted. Maintainers should not be "forced" to accept code, and indeed, rust code should 'generally' be kept separate. This of course causes a whole lot of other issues, but that is what you get for having a dual language codebase.
The technical methods to handle these sorts of projects are not complex, the political aspects of course are not.
Many years of OSS have taught me what my strengths are, and political issues are not among them.
If I could give advice (which would not be accepted)... it would be to look at how enterprise handles multi language codebases.
kur41
Terence Eden
stephen
michiel
Howard Chu @ Symas
Ian
David Andersen
ティージェーグレェ
Adam Williamson 
TJ 
Fiona Bianchi
Tristan Colgate-McFarlane
Arcaik
Thomas Depierre
Tara Tarakiyee
bmaxv
Wladimir Palant
Martin Uecker
maco
FJ!!
Jonathan Corbet
Luis Villa
Binder🅅