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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @whynothugo@fosstodon.org
@whynothugo There are plenty of developers who write documentation, don't get me wrong; some of them work quite hard at it. But that is usually not what their employers are paying them to do.
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Jonathan Corbet

I have often complained that, even though thousands of developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel, there is not a single person whose job it is to write documentation for the kernel. The problem is wider than that, though: Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the man pages collection for the last four years, can no longer afford to do it for free.

https://lwn.net/ml/all/4d7tq6a7febsoru3wjium4ekttuw2ouocv6jstdkthnacmzr6x@f2zfbe5hs7h5
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @lina@vt.social
@lina As far as I can tell, you do have an LWN subscription. I definitely encourage you to add your point of view there.

This was one of those articles where the best I can hope for is that everybody is equally mad at me... can I go write about memory tiering now?
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @marnanel@queer.party
@marnanel @brauner The case that brought this to mind is https://lwn.net/ml/all/cd788ccf-0cf1-85d5-1bf8-efc259bd7e11@amd.com/

...more details on LWN shortly...
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @pkal@commenting.onthe.incoherenceofthe.net
@pkal Heh ... one could have a *lot* of fun playing with that idea...
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @jwf@floss.social
@jwf NAK (or NACK) - negative acknowledge - is a curt way of saying that a patch will be rejected.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @brauner@mastodon.social
@brauner I'm digging through the whole Asahi Lina graphics driver story, but it's something I've often thought.
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Jonathan Corbet

Edited 10 months ago
The more I dig through kernel mailing list discussions, the more I think that we would do well to end the use of "NAK" entirely. It is an exercise of power that is hurtful to read and gets in the way of an actual discussion of how a patch needs to be improved. I have, in my maintainer role, never said "NAK" to a patch and plan to continue that way.

*Edited* since people are asking: NAK (or NACK) comes (I believe) from the ASCII negative-acknowledge character. In this context, is an abrupt way for a maintainer to reject a patch.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @lina@vt.social
@lina If you approach a large city with a plan to install a shiny new utility system, you will quickly find yourself dealing with a whole range of bureaucrats, some of whom will be more helpful than others. The kernel project resembles that large city in a number of ways. I don't say this is a good thing, but it is a thing.

I believe that the Rust for Linux project is succeeding. Yes, it is slow and painful, but the people pushing this work are doing the right things and making progress.

The city council (the maintainers summit) is meeting on September 17. Rust will be on the agenda, and there should be a couple of Rust for Linux developers there. That would be a good time to have a well-thought-out proposal for process changes that you would like to see.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @lina@vt.social
@lina Extrapolating one developer's words into "this is what kernel maintainers think" is an obvious logical failure and is not the way to advance the Rust cause. The fact that several kernel maintainers spoke out against the "unmerged toy" description makes it clear that it is not a majority opinion. There are a lot of people in the kernel community who support this work.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @jarkko
@jarkko I hate to say it, but I think you are setting an impossible standard here. Is there any subsystem in the kernel, written in any language, that is so well documented that a developer unfamiliar with the implementation language could understand a patch to it?

The kernel's documentation is ... not great ... and it seems to me that the Rust folks are trying to do a little better.
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Jonathan Corbet

I'll answer your email soon, honest, but first I have some important meetings to get through...
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Jonathan Corbet

@oleksandr Ouch ... it is sad indeed to see a site like that go down. "the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again" - indeed.

RE: https://activitypub.natalenko.name/@oleksandr/statuses/01J6HPBQ5S4S1W6H5R172A6GMT
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Jonathan Corbet

This year's COVID vaccine is coming out in the US. Just booked my appointment so I can get jabbed ahead of the fall travel nightmare.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @evan@cosocial.ca
@evan We (LWN - @LWN) maintain an events calendar at https://lwn.net/Calendar/, with an associated call-for-proposals calendar at https://lwn.net/Calendar/Monthly/cfp/ . We're focused on the Linux and free-software worlds, but try to be fairly comprehensive within it.
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Jonathan Corbet

If you want to know where the action is in a wildfire, just follow the aircraft. I'm supposed to be getting work done, but its hard, especially when they keep flying over my house.

Hopefully they are starting to get a handle on some of these.
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Jonathan Corbet

So there are fires burning up and down the Colorado front range. At least one person has died already. The air inside the house makes my eyes burn. It seems like a good time to be careful.

There are people seriously talking about the possibility of a serial arsonist setting these things off. But, then, some idiots decided that last night would be a good time to go play with fireworks above town and duly set another one. I guess we should not attribute to malice that which can be explained by appalling stupidity.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @basha@social.nayab.dev
@basha Most of the crawlers do not even identify themselves as such; they will not consult the robots.txt file. There are no solutions to be found there, unfortunately.
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Jonathan Corbet

There are now two fires visible from my house... Slurry bombers overhead. Still a tiny problem compared to what some others are dealing with, but still... this sucks.
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Jonathan Corbet

I went to Jasper many years ago and thought it was an amazing place; I've always intended to get back there. Not this year, I guess.

This sucks; we are losing our treasures.

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/25/nx-s1-5052037/jasper-alberta-canada-wildfire
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