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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   28811 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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https://xkcd.com/1172/

Or as a modern sage once explained:

On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 6:08 AM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab mchehab@redhat.com wrote:

Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio.

Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?

If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?

To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid.

So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious bugs and/or regressions.

Shut up, Mauro. And I don't ever want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.

I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. And you've shown yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly and immediately myself.

WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!

Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email was so horribly wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit. It adds an insane error code (ENOENT), and then because it's so insane, it adds a few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret").

The fact that you then try to make excuses for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that used to work, is just shameful. It's not how we work.

Fix your f*cking "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken. And fix your approach to kernel programming.

It's a little interesting to contrast this with my perception of Chen's attitude. He clearly was dedicated to making sure software that used to work would continue to work for users. It is basically never the software users fault that the program they bought did things wrong. On the other hand, he has palpable contempt for the developers of user-mode software that took a dependency on some undefined or non-contractual behavior and created these compatibility constraints. Ex: Application compatibility layers are there for the customer, not for the program

Some time ago, a customer asked this curious question (paraphrased, as always):

Hi, we have a program that was originally designed for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but we found that it runs into difficulties on Windows Vista. We’ve found that if we set the program into Windows XP compatibility mode, then the program runs fine on Windows Vista. What changes do we need to make to our installer so that when the user runs it on Windows Vista, it automatically runs in Windows XP compatibility mode?

Don’t touch that knob; the knob is there for the customer, not for the program. And it’s there to clean up after your mistakes, not to let you hide behind them.

It’s like saying, “I normally toss my garbage on the sidewalk in front of the pet store, and every morning, when they open up, somebody sweeps up the garbage and tosses it into the trash. But the pet store isn’t open on Sundays, so on Sundays, the garbage just sits there. How can I get the pet store to open on Sundays, too?”

The correct thing to do is to figure out what your program is doing wrong and fix it. You can use the Application Compatibility Toolkit to see all of the fixes that go into the Windows XP compatibility layer, then apply them one at a time until you find the one that gets your program running again. For example, if you find that your program runs fine once you apply the VersionLie shim, then go and fix your program’s operating system version checks.

But don’t keep throwing garbage on the street.

I don't think they're really different attitudes. The things that got developers in trouble on the Windows side was broken code (in the sense of something like use-after-free) or use of undocumented code/code that wasn't part of the API contract. So when stuff that was outside of the API contract changed behavior, programs that were violating the API contract broke and that was the sort of stuff the compatibility code on the Windows side had to deal with. On the Linux kernel side, Linus considers everything exposed to userspace to be part of the contract, and anything that changes behavior in a way that breaks userspace is a violation of the contract from the kernel side.

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