The primary job of the kernel maintainer is to be a technical gatekeeper, not a social one.
It is fine to have standards for submission, including asking things like READMEs to be free of politics. They could have rejected the original commit for that reason. Even these kinds of policies are difficult to apply uniformly and fairly.
That said, the original text was a bit mean spirited but pretty harmless, especially for people unfamiliar with the internal project drama. It looks a lot worse through the lens of knowing that he is a murderer.
What I asking is that it not become anybody’s job to retroactively edit the kernel history for social reasons. Why would this README need to be modified or removed after being accepted?
Who makes the decision for what gets changed and to what? For what reason? Should the project have changed the name of the filesystem once it was clear it was named after a murderer? Are we all complicit in that crime for having this code on our computers?
My point is exactly that the kernel is not a library.
Removing ReiserFS because of its lack of maintenance and future relevance is good kernel maintenance. Rewriting the README like it is a Wikipedia article is not.
The primary job of the kernel maintainer is to be a technical gatekeeper, not a social one.
It is fine to have standards for submission, including asking things like READMEs to be free of politics. They could have rejected the original commit for that reason. Even these kinds of policies are difficult to apply uniformly and fairly.
That said, the original text was a bit mean spirited but pretty harmless, especially for people unfamiliar with the internal project drama. It looks a lot worse through the lens of knowing that he is a murderer.
What I asking is that it not become anybody’s job to retroactively edit the kernel history for social reasons. Why would this README need to be modified or removed after being accepted?
Who makes the decision for what gets changed and to what? For what reason? Should the project have changed the name of the filesystem once it was clear it was named after a murderer? Are we all complicit in that crime for having this code on our computers?
My point is exactly that the kernel is not a library.
Removing ReiserFS because of its lack of maintenance and future relevance is good kernel maintenance. Rewriting the README like it is a Wikipedia article is not.
It literally just was and for the same reasons I’m saying it should have been.