[Szpadel]

> What you're missing is that if the Rust folks are unable, for whatever reasons, to keep their promises, it falls on the up-tree maintainers to maintain their code.

But that's the thing, the deal was that existing maintainers do not need to maintain that code.

Their role is to just forward issues/breaking changes to rust maintainer in case those were omitted in CC.

You are using the same argument that was explained multiple times already in this thread: no one is forcing anybody to learn rust.

[tmoertel]

The point is that “the deal” assumes that the Rust folks will keep their promises for the long haul. Which kernel maintainers, who have witnessed similar promises fall flat, are not willing to trust at face value.

What if, in years to come, the R4L effort peters out? Who will keep their promises then? And what will it cost those people to keep those broken promises?

The existing kernel maintainers mostly believe that the answers to the questions are “we will get stuck with the burden” and “it will be very expensive since we are not Rust programmers.”

[Szpadel]

Isn't it the same as with support for old hardware? Alpha arch, intel itanium, floppy drives?

Those are all in similar situation, where there is noone to maintain it as none of maintsiners have access to such hardware to event test of that is working correctly.

From time to time we see that such thing is discovered that is not working at all for long time and noone noticed and is dropped from kernel.

The same would happen to rust if noone would like to maintain it.

Rust for Linux is provided as experimental thing and if it won't gain traction it will be dropped in the same way curl dropped it.

[tmoertel]

The reason the maintainers can drop support for hardware nobody uses is that dropping support won't harm end users. The same cannot be expected of Rust in the kernel. The Rust For Linux folks, like most sensible programmers, intend to have impact. They are aiming to create abstractions and drivers that will deliver the benefits of Rust to users widely, eliminating classes memory errors, data races, and logic bugs. Rust will not be limited to largely disposable parts of Linux. Once it reaches even a small degree of inclusion it will be hard to remove without affecting end users substantially.

[lelanthran]

> You are using the same argument that was explained multiple times already in this thread: no one is forcing anybody to learn rust.

I think this sort of statement is what is setting the maintainers against the R4L campaigners.

In casual conversation, campaigners say "No one is being forced to learn Rust". In the official statements (see upthread where I made my previous reply) it's made very clear that the maintainers will be forced to learn Rust.

The official policy trumps any casual statement made while proselytising.

Repeating the casual statement while having a different policy comes across as very dishonest on the part of the campaigners when delivered to the maintainers.