
How feminism helped me solve one of file systems’ oldest conundrums - zdw
http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2014/10/03/operating-systems-war-story-how-feminism-helped-me-solve-one-of-file-systems-oldest-conundrums/
======
vaurora
OP here. To all the people flustered that I'm calling "listening politely" and
"respecting people" feminist acts, I'll point out that, at the time, the only
place you could reasonably expect that behavior in the Linux community was...
a feminist collective, LinuxChix.

To this day, women in $COMPUTER_THING groups tend to be overrun by men
searching for a civil place to have a technical conversation. It happened with
the #debian-women IRC channel too. Just today, another man told me how
volunteering for Women Who Code taught him to be more welcoming to newcomers
in his own open source project. And have you seen the stickers on Guido Van
Rossum's laptop?

So, yeah, it's possible to have these values without identifying as feminist,
but in open source software today, explicitly feminist communities are usually
the only ones that put these values into practice.

~~~
ObviousScience
Your comment suggests a strong confounding factor: feminist communities are
likely to be both smaller and more focused on user conduct than technical
communities at large.

Without controlling for these factors, attaching the behaviors you do to
"feminism" is nothing but saying "good things are done by those who agree with
me, and bad things are done by those /others/".

Your argument does nothing to explain why you think this happens, and simply
admits you're appropriating them without knowing why the correlation exists in
communities.

Classic propaganda.

Ed:

I'm glad I've been downvoted and apologized for because I raised a
methodological issue with trying to ascribe behaviors to a community, instead
of actually showing me where she discussed why she doesn't think it's either
of the (relatively well known) effects I asked about. I couldn't find anywhere
she addressed this topic, but I'm entirely open to being corrected.

Here's the wikipedia article on the fallacy I'm claiming is being committed
here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

Ed 2:

My latin is terrible these days, lol

~~~
hashbanged
> feminist communities are likely to be both smaller and more focused on user
> conduct than technical communities at large

Is Python small? I'm sure there were other small linux communities (the term
seems almost redundant) who were much less welcoming to women.

I don't know what to say to convince you that open source communities are
traditionally hyper male and sexist. It's not so hard to imagine that you
might get more contributions from women in an explicitly women friendly space
within a larger women unfriendly (to say the least) community.

Here's some reading, I encourage you to read it if you think I'm wrong.

[http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...](http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/3381)

~~~
ObviousScience
> Also, these communities’ openness means that a minority of difficult members
> (including, for example, a sincere misogynist or an insincere troll) can
> disproportionately affect the tone and dynamics of interactions. Finally,
> the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used to (a)
> suppress concerns by labeling them as “censorship” and, to (b) rationalize
> low female participation as simply a matter of women’s choice.

> I argue that some otherwise commendable features of the free culture
> movement also contribute to the gender gap. That is, the geek stereotype and
> discursive style can be unappealing, open communities are especially
> susceptible to difficult people, and the ideas of freedom and openness can
> be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of
> preference and choice.

I'm making a second reply purely to point out that the article you cited
talked about confounding influences as being one of the main sources of the
problem, while you attacked my comment for talking about confounding
influences being part of the solution.

That seems absolutely insane, and suggests you didn't actually respond to my
comment on the merits, but rather, out of anger someone didn't agree with you.

------
simoncion
> As recently as 2013, a leading file systems developer was still arguing that
> file systems didn’t have to save file data reliably by mocking users for
> playing computer games.

Tso neither mocks users for playing games, nor argues that filesystems should
not be required to be reliable. He says:

"[Lortie, that filesystem operation that you said was guaranteed to be safe
actually isn't safe. You mis-read the docs. It's racy, and here are the two
races that you could lose. Losing both could lose your data. Here's an analogy
to illustrate the races: ]

The failure scenario would probably be something like the user who plays tux
racer all the time, and uses crappy proprietary drivers that crash the system
every single time an OpenGL application exits. If they think that's normal,
and are willing to live with the crap proprietary drivers, and they are also
the sort of people who carefully position all of their windows to be precisely
just so, and if the !@#!?! desktop libraries are still bogusly rewriting the
entire contents of every single registry file, regardless of whether the
application changed anything --- then eventually, said user will whine about
how the hours she spent obsessively setting up their window layout got lost
after Tux Racer creashed (sic) their system _again_."

Notice the carefully constructed persona used in the illustration:

* Tolerates terrible, crashy, OpenGL drivers.

* Makes use of the OpenGL drivers by playing a video game.

* Spends a lot of time meticulously positioning application windows.

* Uses a WM that stores application window position in a single file that gets updated all the damn time for no reason at all.

* Whines when the enormous amount of work put into positioning windows gets wasted when the poorly-designed software they're using crashes and takes some of their data with it.

~~~
vaurora
It _was_ safe to rename() a file and expect the data it contained after crash
to either be (1) the data before the rename(), (2) the data after the
rename(). What changing the ext4 default logging mode to "data=writeback" did
is add two more options, (3) nothing (0 bytes), and (4) whatever random
garbage it found on disk, potentially including a copy of /etc/shadow. No-one
misread the docs, the behavior changed.

But hey, if you're angling to be hired by a YC-funded storage startup, this is
certainly a post.

~~~
simoncion
> No-one misread the docs, the behavior changed.

I write this without a hint of snarkiness or ill will. Please keep this fact
in mind as you read on.

If you read the message by Lortie [0] that Ts'o responded to [1] you find that
Lortie was _specifically_ talking about the guarantees made by _ext4_ in
regards to rename behavior. In that message Lortie says "[the documentation of
ext4 in Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt] says to me "replace by rename is
guaranteed safe in modern ext4, under default mount options"." Ts'o opens his
message with "It's not _guaranteed_ safe."

I understand that people are frustrated about ext4's default options. In the
referenced exchange, neither Lortie nor Ts'o were talking about the merits of
the differences between the rename robustness guarantees of ext4 and other
filesystems. Lortie was double-checking his understanding of the documentation
of the guarantees that _ext4_ provides with its default options. Ts'o was
correcting Lortie's misunderstanding of that documentation.

[0] [http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-
ext4/msg38774.html](http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ext4/msg38774.html)

[1] [http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-
ext4/msg38778.html](http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ext4/msg38778.html)

~~~
vaurora
Trying to figure out how to apply Charles' Rules of Argument to the situation,
I realized I wrote an entire article on this topic (and linked to it from the
OP):

[http://lwn.net/Articles/351422/](http://lwn.net/Articles/351422/)

Short version: ext4's behavior under default mount options changed. You can't
blame it on someone mis-reading the docs.

~~~
Dylan16807
The actual behavior is orthogonal to the guarantees in the documentation.

------
TTPrograms
> But I was part of a culture – a feminist culture – in which I respected
> people like my friend and programmers that attempted to use fully defined,
> useful features of UNIX in order to implement features efficiently.

That is one hell of a stretch of the definition of feminism.

This article seems like some weird interweaving of two unrelated stories about
sexism in tech and relative atime. The stories independently seem reasonable,
but this weird fusion does not really make sense to me other than as a
promotional advantage.

~~~
fizwhiz
OP seems to have conflated taking a "human-centered" approach with a
"feminist" approach. This constant reinforcement in the article about taking
the "human" point of view leads me to believe that OP's perception of non-
feminists is that they're in the camp of people more likely to take a "non-
human-centered" approach. How bizarre.

~~~
richmarr
It's not conflation, she used approaches developed in another context. Jumping
from feminist to human-centred doesn't seem like a bizarre stretch to me at
all. Both (from the perspective of the status quo) involve letting go of "I
know best" and attempting to empathise with others, understand their problems,
and often try to drive change.

~~~
dwild
Am I the only one that feel like this article is a whole "I know best" than
non-feminist group?

~~~
richmarr
No, I don't think you are the only one. My personal take is that the OP meant
no such thing.

I think she's just saying that women bring different approaches, and those
different approaches can be useful.

~~~
Dylan16807
Interesting that you use the word 'just' there. I think it's a much stronger
statement to say that women bring different useful approaches than to say that
feminism does so. It's an assertion of differences at a significantly deeper
level.

------
aftbit
It seems to me that the author is conflating feminism with her helpful
community of mailing lists, and further with good engineering practice.

I don't see anything particularly feminist about reporting bugs upstream.

~~~
muglug
She's saying that the creation of a "safe space" for women to discuss linux
development without fear of dismissal was key to her being able to solve the
atime issue.

~~~
andrewchambers
But why limit it to a safe space for women, why not a safe space for anyone
who doesn't want to be insulted?

It seems sexist to me to assume men can't be in a non abusive community.

~~~
sliverstorm
I'm not a gender studies major, but to me it seems safe to say feminism is
_rampant_ with sexism. Not necessarily in the hateful way, but in the way that
affirmative action is fundamentally racist.

So, while I may not always agree, it is never a surprise.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Feminism, in general, is biased against men in the same sense that giving a
short person a box to stand on at a concert so he can see the stage, and not
giving a box to a tall person who can see just fine already, shows bias
against tall people.

~~~
sliverstorm
I'm not condemning box-giving. I'm just pointing out that only giving boxes to
short people is by definition discriminatory (I hope you agree or we need to
have another conversation).

It's positive discrimination (which, coincidentally, is how affirmative action
is described) but discrimination nonetheless.

I'm not judging. I just thought I would share because I find it useful to
remember.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Hmm. How would you categorize, say, giving powered wheelchairs only to people
who have difficulty walking, and not to people who can walk fine by
themselves?

------
yummyfajitas
How misogyny helped me beat the market

I had a problem - figure out how to make money off the stock market. Luckily I
was part of a culture - a privileged mysoginist racist evil culture - which
recognizes that there is an objective reality that can be approximated by
concrete models and empirical corrections. So I did some bayesian stats and
came up with a moneymaking stat arb strategy.

That's about as reasonable an argument as the one contained in the OP. It
occasionally brushes against reality (e.g. feminist critiques of analytic
philosophy and objectivity [1]) but really just attributes intellectual
success to an unrelated ideology.

That said, I'm upvoting this in the hopes that someone can steelman her
argument, which could be interesting. The aforementioned steelman should
hopefully also reject my argument.

[1] [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-
analytic/#FemC...](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-
analytic/#FemCriAna) [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-
epistemology/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/)

~~~
Uhhrrr
One thing to note is that the particular problem was known, but all the
solutions involved suffering: "“Switch to a slower directory-based method,” or
“Use a file size hack that had bugs,” or any number of other unhelpful
things".

Maybe this comes from a macho sensibility. Another example is the problem that
it's easy for a noob or fat-fingered typist to type "rm -rf *". The current
solution is "lump it".

Maybe women are more likely to weight things in favor of not blowing things up
(data from actual women needed), and feminism is required to give equal weight
to that viewpoint.

Many maybes here. I am spitballing too.

~~~
arjie
You want to allow rm -rf * (shell globbing happens first, so rm cannot know it
was called with _).

You also want to allow rm -rf ./_ but you don't want to allow rm -rf / *. And
that's where `--preserve-root` comes in, which is default now I believe.

EDIT: How annoying. The asterisk makes emphasis weirdly.

------
tonysuper
I don't really see how this is feminism. I do think that supporting women in
tech is a noble goal, but "considering user needs in the design of a system"
never struck me as a uniquely feminist concept.

~~~
halostatue
Supporting women in tech is not a “noble goal”; it’s a baseline for civilised
behaviour. And while “considering user needs in the design of a system” isn’t
_necessarily_ feminist, it is something that is more likely to come up within
a space that _starts_ from respect rather than disrespect.

(Blaming users, male or female, is inherently anti-feminist.)

~~~
andrewchambers
Actually, it sounds like an issue completely unrelated to gender at all.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Much of feminism - particular the branch that is vocal within the tech
community - is not gender-specific. It's a social (and in many cases,
political) worldview.

~~~
andrewchambers
Then why call it feminism? That is just misleading.

------
penrod
"Unfortunately, as a result of my work, several more Linux storage developers
came out publicly in favor of harassment and assault."

I really would like links to these public statements. I'm not a fan of
shaming, but if people are advocating violence, some finger-pointing would be
entirely appropriate.

~~~
vaurora
Will you volunteer to filter my social media and email for rape threats, and
compensate me for the lifetime earnings loss that is the result of naming
someone who controls whether my code gets merged or whether I get invited to
the top Linux invite-only summits? I've learned not to name names unless I'm
ready to face the consequences of speaking out to protect other people.

------
bjourne
Of the three options noatime, relatime and atime, I think relatime is the
worst. Why? Because it is the most complex. Ordered by complexity, noatime is
the easiest and relatime the hardest. Updating a timestamp based on an
algorithm is much harder than never doing it or always doing it.

Complexity is bad, complexity even if it solves user problems is bad. The bash
shellshock bug is a consequence of complexity.

If I where Linux dictator, file access time would be deprecated starting from
today. POSIX be damned, but they can also do the right thing and deprecate
atime in their standard. Mutt would suffer but I'm pretty sure I could write a
patch for it to make it independent of files atimes. It saddens me that it
seemingly "cant be done" because of legacy. Linux is full of Unix cruft in
every corner (dotfiles anyone?) it needs to be cleaned up.

~~~
tomp
Although you're right about it being relatively the most complex, it's
absolutely a very simple algorithm.

noatime:

    
    
      if false:
        update()
    

atime:

    
    
      if true:
        update()
    

relatime:

    
    
      if a > b:
        update()
    

Doesn't seem very complex to me.

~~~
bjourne
I believe the original check was if mtime was greater than _or equal_ to
atime. The current Linux implementation isn't that simple though, see:
[http://lwn.net/Articles/244829/](http://lwn.net/Articles/244829/). If you
allow some extra complexity, it's easy to then allow some more, and then some
more..

------
ps4fanboy
As a man I have found the linux community extremely toxic, RTFM etc, over time
this has gotten better, but I would hardly call it sexism.

~~~
agrover
It's not about sexism, it's about decreasing "geek machismo" that has existed
in the community, and how this helps more people be comfortable putting
themselves out there and having a technical discussion (where there is always
a nonzero chance one is wrong) in public.

fwiw the Kernelnewbies list and irc is another good place to start for civil
kernel discussion. I would suggest that common to both it and Linuxchix is the
belief that no matter what the questioner or respondents' level of expertise,
the only possible response to a question is a positive, helpful one.

~~~
fizwhiz
This entire article could communicated everything it intended by focusing on
the motivations behind creating intermediate "safe spaces" to have an open
judgement-free discourse. Instead, it was pitched as a pro-feminist piece
coming across as Feminism = InclusiveProgress. I'm in agreement with
ObviousScience when he says that it came across as a propaganda piece.

Also, I would rephrase the "geek machismo" to "geek hardassery" since machismo
seems to outline masculine pride. I do, however, agree that people tend to be
hardasses with the whole RTFD/RTFM angle and that's something we could
collectively improve upon.

~~~
ps4fanboy
I think this is a biproduct of what open source is. People contributing their
spare time for little to no financial gain, and when new people expect them to
hold their hands they take offense and lash out. I think it could be a
slippery slope to expect people to act a certain way when contributing to the
common good (open source and the like) because really there is no obligation
to use the work these people produce.

Conversely this sort of behavior when dealing with vendors where money changes
hands is almost non existent. And I suspect this is because there is a
economic incentive in place for people to act civil to each other.

Complaining about this dynamic wont change it only changes to the economic
model will change peoples behavior.

------
kangaroo5383
Great read, thank you for posting that! There's an interesting shift towards
empathy in programming that I think will make better software. The empathy to
ask - what is the easiest for the user, what are the expected actions and
expected results from the user's point of view, etc. This same approach can be
used in actual software design as well - treat each components / class / API
as a person with motivations and goals, figuring out what's the least amount
of info this person needs, best way to get to their goal etc. I've found that
way of thinking yields cleaner design overall, and is easier to communicate to
others. This method of approaching problems should be encouraged, heck, if not
demanded, from all!

------
nickthemagicman
The problem with women's groups in technology is that there are very few women
in tech to join the groups.

And I highly doubt that male chauvinism/sexism/harassment is the reason women
aren't going into tech careers.

[http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/chala...](http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/chalabi-
datalab-flightattendants-2.png)

~~~
smtddr
_> >And I highly doubt that male chauvinism/sexism/harassment is the reason
women aren't going into tech careers._

Then you're wrong - [http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-
culture/](http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/)

~~~
tzs
That article has serious problems. It is basing much of its analysis on the
idea that the pipeline into tech no longer is highly unbalanced. The sources
cited by the article actually show that this is not correct--the pipeline is
still very unbalanced.

~~~
hypatiadotca
The pipeline is unbalanced, yes, but the meat of the article is in how it
surveys the reasons women leave.

~~~
LyndsySimon
The number of females _entering_ tech is a fraction of the number of males.
Therefore even eliminating all harassment of females would not bring us closer
to equal representation.

That's not to say we shouldn't work to eliminate this treatment or an attempt
to minimize it in any way, of course.

What I believe we should ask ourselves is this: "Is the tech community
responsible for the fact that far fewer females see this industry as a
reasonable and viable career path?"

Until we can answer that question with a confident "nope", then the social
conversation around feminism and its role in our community need not be
settled. We can work toward a more equal future without addressing the
underlying philosophical and political motivations for doing so.

Free individuals, voluntarily working together to achieve a common goal.
That's what it's all about, people. Forget the lables, find something in
common with your neighbors, and make it happen.

~~~
theevocater
Well, if women are leaving faster than men and often cite reasons of being
bullied or otherwise forced out by men... why would women desire to enter that
workforce?

------
lotsofmangos
You can't just bag all reasonable behaviour and call it feminism. Feminism
might be a broad church due to there being many historical revisions of it,
but if you make it so wide as to just basically mean people being nice, then
it loses all meaning.

Also, if you make the argument that a feminist environment was in some way
necessary rather than merely conducive to the development of this particular
solution, then were the experiences gained in a hyper-masculine and highly
misogynistic organization based on the needs of state violence required for
Grace Hopper to invent compilers, given that she was a Rear Admiral in the US
Navy?

edit - I fully support the creation of comfortable safe spaces and
organisations that bring more people into programming as society in general
seems far too accepting of abusive bigots, so these places and organisations
serve a good and useful purpose. I also think that the creation of spaces like
this will in time help raise the quality of software by having a wider range
of perspectives looking at the problems, so it isn't just a good idea because
it is being nice. I just think that the author here is putting an undue amount
of weight on feminism as a major cause of this particular solution to the
atime problem. I can't see anything about it as a solution that couldn't have
been worked out by, say for instance, a hermit who hates everyone.

~~~
knowtheory
Er, why not? Are reasonable behaviors a scarce commodity?

If the argument is that

1) Feminism is a tradition of empathy and humanism 2) the application of OP's
feminist ethos led OP to prioritize the needs of users in a particular way

then isn't this particular manner of operating, by OP's definition, feminist?

You can argue that Feminism is indistinguishable from _other_ sorts of ethos,
but it'd be hard to argue that it's _not an ethos_ at all.

~~~
lotsofmangos
Ok, you can, but I just like well defined terms as it makes it easier to know
what you are discussing.

Feminism is very broad already, a good example being the conflict between
those who advocate for equality in political representation and those who
advocate for working towards a utopian matriarchy.

I just think it is confusing and weakens the argument being made by
overstating it, to make the definition broader still.

