Re: [GIT PULL] bcachefs changes for 6.17

From: Konstantin Shelekhin
Date: Mon Aug 11 2025 - 17:05:18 EST


On 11/08/2025 17:26, Kent Overstreet wrote:

Konstantin, please tell me what you're basing this on.

This, for example: - https://lore.kernel.org/all/9db17620-4b93-4c01-b7f8-ecab83b12d0f@xxxxxxxxx/ - https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250308155011.1742461-1-kent.overstreet@xxxxxxxxx/ I've just lurked around lore for a couple of minutes.

The claims I've been hearing have simply lacked any kind of specifics;
if there's people I'd pissed off for no reason, I would've been happy to
apologize, but I'm not aware of the incidences you're claiming - not
within a year or more; I have made real efforts to tone things down.

Both links are four months old.

On the other hand, for the only incidences I can remotely refer to in
the past year and a half, there has been:

- the mm developer who started outright swearing at me on IRC in a
discussion about assertions

That is very unfortunate.

- the block layer developer who went on a four email rant where he,
charitably, misread the spec or the patchset or both; all this over a
patch to simply bring a warning in line with the actual NVME and SCSI
specs.

My team has contributed to NVMe and SCSI subsystems, so I have some
experience working with Jens, Martin and Christoph. Nobody on my team
had this level of drama, even when we were in disagreement about specs
or intended behavior.

- and reference to an incident at LSF, but the only noteworthy event
that I can recall at the last LSF (a year and a half ago) was where a
filesystem developer chased a Rust developer out of the community.

So: what am I supposed to make of all this?

That you're trying to excuse your communication issues with other people's
communication issues?

To an outsider, I don't think any of this looks like a reasonable or
measured response, or professional behaviour. The problems with toxic
behaviour have been around long before I was prominent, and they're
still in evidence.

Again, "Timmy also did that" is not a very good excuse for a grown up adult.

It is not reasonable or professional to jump from professional criticism
of code and work to personal attacks: it is our job to be critical of
our own and each other's code, and while that may bring up strong
feelings when we feel our work is attacked, that does not mean that it
is appropriate to lash out.

This is _NOT_ about the code. That's the essence of your struggles. Forget
about the code, the code is not the issue here. Communication is.

As a reminder, this all stems from a single patch, purely internal to
fs/bcachefs/, that was a critical, data integrity hotfix.

But this does not matter. No matter how important your fix is.

There has been a real pattern of hyper reactive, dramatic responses to
bugfixes in the bcachefs pull requests, all the way up to full blown
repeated threats of removing it from the kernel, and it's been toxic.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Piss off a maintainer long enough,
he will refuse to work with you. Who would've thought, eh?

And it's happening again, complete with full blown rants right off the
bat in the private maintainer thread about not trusting my work (and I
have provided data and comparisons with btrfs specifically to rebut
that), all the way to "everyone hates you and you need therapy". That is
not reasonable or constructive.

You seem to ignore what people keep telling you: _COMMUNICATION_ is the
problem, not the _CODE_. So arguments about how btrfs performs compared
to bcachefs do not matter.

Your result is not the issue, the journey with you is.