this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
106 points (94.9% liked)
Linux
47929 readers
1154 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not being familiar with the subject matter, reading this made almost no sense to me
Essentially, an updated dependency requirement in Mesa (updated Zlib) broke an important benchmarking tool (SPECViewPerf) used by hardware vendors. Subsequently, this change was reverted. This caused a debate in the Mesa dev community, with some devs claiming it's not Mesa's fault, it should be treated as a bug in SPECViewPerf instead. In response, AMD's Mesa dev said this isn't a technical issue, but rather a political/strategic issue - you don't want to anger important workstation vendors and other high-level parties who use this tool, especially since they contribute so much to the Linux ecosystem. That would make the Mesa project seem very immature/unreliable.
As an example, imagine if this change broke something more popular like Steam - Valve and all Linux gamers would be out for blood and you bet the Mesa change would be reverted without debate - even if they were technically in the right (that it's not a bug).
So this incident serves as an important reminder for those who work on big opensource projects like this - just because your actions are technically correct, it doesn't mean it's okay to break everyone else's stuff, expecting they'll fix it. This is in fact something Linus preaches when it comes to kernel dev - "don't break userspace".
Thanks for commenting!
I very much agree with, "don't break userspace", and this was a wise choice.
On the other hand, if capital becomes the developers' core objective and they would not have made the same action for plebeian users, this would be an outrage.
You're right, but only to the extent that the capital coming from your users is disproportionate. Some spaces have money coming from mostly those plebeian users.
It sounds like the devs didn't read Linus' rant