Attention is currently required from: Arthur Heymans, Nico Huber, Jonathan Zhang, Johnny Lin, David Hendricks, Christian Walter, Deomid "rojer" Ryabkov, Tim Chu. Stefan Reinauer has posted comments on this change. ( https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/57589 )
Change subject: Revert "Add support for Intel Emmitsburg PCH" ......................................................................
Patch Set 3:
(1 comment)
Patchset:
PS1:
From an outside perspective without having skin in the game of this specific issue: Forking is not always bad. If there are two opposing trains of thought that can not be unified properly, or if there is a lack in will to make that happen, allowing everybody to move on and make their own version better for themselves and their customer base can even help to overcome differences in the long run (see egcs vs gcc a long time ago).
I agree and this is why I bring it up from time to time without meaning it as a threat.
At some point it is better to try this out and see if it is what you think it is. For your own peace and that of everybody else. I for one would be excited to see different directions take place at the same time. That's much more energizing than yet another community where people don't get along.
Nico, you are unhappy with about everybody trying to work with you here,
"everybody": About 1 out of 10 people and only 1 in total long-term.
Admittedly I am bad at keeping lists. It seemed to have been everybody that I have worked with, at some point, but that may very well only be a small portion of the flashrom contributors. I apologize if I managed to become your long-term foe.
and you are offering to fork the project fairly frequently.
About once per year since Google tried to converge their fork with brute force.
Look, "Google" is not trying to do anything with brute force here. David, for one (who has not been at Google for many years), never really bothered if upstream would like the code contributions that he managed to integrate from the Chrome OS team. He was criticized for letting things diverge, and so another person came along, and another, and none of them were seemingly able to make much progress here, even decade long contributors to coreboot were in this list. That is not a sign of agressive convergence or brute force. Now, Edward came along, and Edward is an assertive guy that follows up and follows through, and that can be both a blessing and a curse. I myself have been a complete jerk to Edward when he tried to merge LLVM support into coreboot at the time many years ago (and I never appropriately apologized), because I felt that he was diverging the direction of the project away from the stable construct that we had at the time to something that is too in love with the tools and programming languages used. I felt at times the same about Rust, go, and Ada. Today I feel that I would have been better off seeing Edward's work as the investment that it was, instead of a destructive intrusion. Luckily by the time Ada came around, I had already learned a lesson there.
It is unhealthy for you and everybody else involved in this project to keep the threat of breakup over everybody's head. I would encourage you to think about whether that is what you want and if so, I will gladly help you with resources (hosting, etc) to get your fork started and off the ground. I will also gladly pay for a domain for you for the first couple of years.
That is a nice offer. But what is holding me back is not the lack of resources, but the people who ask me to continue and get another release done eventually.
You can of course do another release also from a new project. Life does not stop at any single moment but the last one. I hope you will be releasing software for decades to come, no matter what the project. My understanding was also that you have officially resigned from the flashrom project a while ago?
We have all started out as friends in this project, and it is good to remember that in the end we share 95% of the same goals, even if we like to fight to the last breath over the remaining 5%. Let's not use those 5% disagreement as a reason to create an environment in which none of us wants to be. It's not worth anybody's life time.
This is one of the misunderstandings in this project. We don't share 95% of the same goals. And I don't think it's wise to ignore that. On one hand, there is flashrom, the thing that is packaged in long-term stable OS distri- butions that is used by humble users and needs to be 100% reliable so they don't brick their machine (or at least reliable enough so we are not buried under support requests). On the other hand, there is flashrom, a development tool. For most developers flashrom is the latter, I think.
Please don't ignore diversity.
As grown-up people we can often hold conflicting goals in mind at the same time. I would still hold up that 95% of our developers are interested in creating a tool that is both capable of stable OS distribution as well as use as a development tool. The degree to which one lets the project encompass both of those goals and juggles the objectives successfully is leadership.
I don't think that I ignore diversity, although your line of thought is compelling there and I would like to know more about how you get to that conclusion.
I am open to suggestions but this way of treating each other needs to stop.
Ok, then we need to talk about how people are treated. Please, Stefan, advice us what we can do better.
I think - and this goes for all of us - that we will be better off putting us into the other person's shoes before alleging that they are only out to hurt us, or even worse "the project" in a religious assumption that only one side can determine what is good for "the project".
I've been working my ass off last sunday for the project. Partially trying to identify regressions and to fix them. I tried to revert one change that was logically wrong and introduced a regression. I got a -2 instantly which was (allegedly) only set to give priority to the author's own unwritten patches.
I really appreciate that you are working hard to accomplish a more stable flashrom. While aggravating, a -2 is not a personal attack, and in this case I am pretty sure that it was an attempt to spark a conversation. I am fairly certain that I have seen similar behavior from you in the past (and I'm sure the other side was upset too ;). Nico, I also don't think that your code or reviews are the only ones that are infallible or that your work is worth significantly more than those of other folks in the community - and that applies as well to Edward and David and the others that are trying to create a working solution for Emmitsburg here.
Do you already see anything there that needs to stop? Or shall I continue to describe what happened?
Trying to figure out your nuance here, but I'm listening.
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Stefan Reinauer (Code Review)