Linus finally stepped in on the kernel mailing list and told Christoph to shut up. He finally is saying something and that is good.

He also said this though:

> So when you change the C interfaces, the Rust people will have to deal with the fallout, and will have to fix the Rust bindings. That's kind of the promise here: there's that "wall of protection" around C developers that don't want to deal with Rust issues in the promise
that they don't *have* to deal with Rust.

I don't have a citation but I remember reading last year complaints from C developers that they were being harassed by Rust maintainers to document their code better and stop making so many changes because it added a lot of difficulty to maintaining their Rust bindings and they didn't like the work of having to figure out how to safely use the APIs by having to read and understand the C code. There are various technical and historical details for why the C part operates like this.

So while it appears that Christoph is being unreasonable I have this little voice in the back of my head that reminds me of working with people and being told that I wouldn't have to change my process etc. And then, slowly, more and more soft demands are placed on you and your time, if you don't do it you're called not a team player, holding back progress, etc. And you end up in fact having to do more work to accommodate these soft demands.

Maybe this is just the reality of working in a team, but it doesn't change the fact that the claim is disingenuous, you will be expected to do more work, your work will be materially changed by having to work with these other people doing something you have no interest in, that none of this would be happening if you didn't have to accommodate this thing you don't care about that you were promised wouldn't affect you.

But this is all speculation. If Linus does what he says then it's not a problem. I would hold him to that and bring it up if people came to me with soft demands that I change my process. I would also file a code of conduct complaint if the person making demands decided to get people to dogpile me on social media, or put my name on a secret blacklist that they quietly give to new contributors to pre-spoil my working relationship with them.