“The most recent example is a now-merged merge request to revert an earlier change bumping the Zlib dependency for Mesa. The basis for that revert is that it breaks SPECViewPerf.”
"Due to Mesa dynamically linking Zlib and how SPECViewPerf is handled, the update happens to break SPECViewPerf that is a popular benchmark for workstation graphics and one commonly used by hardware vendors and other stakeholders. Ultimately it’s an issue with how SPECViewPerf is setup as an application bug but it could also be argued that Mesa could statically link it or better handle its dependencies. In any event, it’s a regression for Mesa and breaks SPECViewPerf. And SPECViewPerf is important to vendors.
So the immediate solution that’s now been merged is to revert that Zlib update commit…"
"They think it’s a technical issue. It’s not. It’s a political and strategic issue for the Mesa community. If you prevent something from working that the industry finds important, you risk destroying real jobs in this community and shrinking it, regressing Mesa’s reputation, making it more inferior in the industry, and thus less important. What this revert does is that it preserves existing jobs (i.e. existing stuff keeps working) and opens the door for creating new jobs and growing this community in a sustainable manner by showing others what it can do. You need capital and business interests to grow the community, and to get that, Mesa must be the best because it’s always competing with alternatives.
If you thought this is only about dependencies, well, you’re mistaken, and if you want to hurt the future of Mesa because your stupid zlib dependency is more important than anything else, including the livelihood of other people, you’re just a foolish bikeshedder."
Essentially, an updated dependency requirement in Mesa (updated Zlib) broke an important benchmarking tool (SPECViewPerf) used by hardware vendors. Subsequently, this change was reverted. This caused a debate in the Mesa dev community, with some devs claiming it’s not Mesa’s fault, it should be treated as a bug in SPECViewPerf instead. In response, AMD’s Mesa dev said this isn’t a technical issue, but rather a political/strategic issue - you don’t want to anger important workstation vendors and other high-level parties who use this tool, especially since they contribute so much to the Linux ecosystem. That would make the Mesa project seem very immature/unreliable.
As an example, imagine if this change broke something more popular like Steam - Valve and all Linux gamers would be out for blood and you bet the Mesa change would be reverted without debate - even if they were technically in the right (that it’s not a bug).
So this incident serves as an important reminder for those who work on big opensource projects like this - just because your actions are technically correct, it doesn’t mean it’s okay to break everyone else’s stuff, expecting they’ll fix it. This is in fact something Linus preaches when it comes to kernel dev - “don’t break userspace”.
Thanks for commenting!
I very much agree with, “don’t break userspace”, and this was a wise choice.
On the other hand, if capital becomes the developers’ core objective and they would not have made the same action for plebeian users, this would be an outrage.
You’re right, but only to the extent that the capital coming from your users is disproportionate. Some spaces have money coming from mostly those plebeian users.
It sounds like the devs didn’t read Linus’ rant