JCjchw·Dec 13, 2020
A quick update. I think I've got a better picture of what's going on.
Firstly, the fortunes mess. It turns out that this is unrelated to the Rizin fork. That fortunes PR happened because of a tweet, which gained moderate popularity, on November 26th, criticizing the fortunes.nsfw file. (Please do not harass this person over their tweet.) ...which occurred after the fork. As far as I can ascertain, the fortunes mess simply doesn't play into this. Unfortunately, this same person seems to think the fork is about that, which is understandable, due to the apparent timelines. On December 6th, they accused Rizin of being an elaborate troll. (I repeat: please do not try to find these tweets and harass them. Disagree in your head if you need to.) THIS tweet is the source of the Reddit comment that is so intriguing. But it's wrong. This isn't about
Read the rest
fortunes.nsfw. The Rizin announcement may be vague, but it's honest: it's really about major disagreements, both technical and otherwise. But I will get to that later.
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OK, part 2. I was wrong to conclude that the Github team was representative of all of the users that are moving to Rizin. It turns out it's more.
So far, you can additionally see pull requests from kazarmy (#2 contributor to radare,) yossizap (#11 contributor to radare.) In addition, because this fork is so relatively new, there are almost certainly other developers who have moved or will move over. An especially strong signal of this is how many of the developers who are high up in the contributors list do not appear recently in the Radare2 pull requests; a majority of open pull requests right now are actually from pancake themselves.
In addition, today I can see there are more users on the GitHub team, including Cutter developer "karliss" and Github user "kazarmy", Khairul Azhar Kasmiran. In addition, we can now see user "officialcjunior", Aswin C, one of the top contributors to the r2book in the last year.
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And finally. The real reason. To most people reading these comments, we are outsiders, but there is a clear sentiment within the r2 community that it is unwelcoming, and there is some strong evidence for this.
For example, there was apparently, at some point, a repository dedicated to... collecting Radare2 hate into Github issues. This is oddly condescending, but what's more concerning is that this seemed to be a way of getting back at anyone who said anything negative about the project.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180612221427if_/https://github...
Mention of r2hate exists on social media. A very well-respected engineer also noted, "...i've been informed that they coped by mocking me in private." Interesting indeed.
If you keep digging you can find more and more evidence that the unprofessionalism of how radare2 was being ran was becoming a drain on the project, and that the issues that lead to its forking are multi-faceted, but absolutely include technical disagreements.
Here are some quotes. I have changed the wording slightly to discourage people from harassing folks, but you can find them if you try hard enough. If you must, please do not interact; it's bad netiquette. I'm just trying to illustrate the problem.
> ignoring everyone's thoughts or feelings or ideas when you don't "get" them 100% is part of why people were calling you an asshole
> In all seriousness that is unbelievably childish. I can just imagine them linking to this exact tweet in one of those "issues" and chuckling about how we're the ones being dicks here without realizing the irony of posting "hatemail".
You can find quotes and threads about it all over. And some of them are people I really respect and trust.
There is also some interesting discourse about Radare2's technical direction, including this comment that seems to have resonated with a couple of people despite being hidden on an old April fools PR.
https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/pull/16392#issuecomment...
In other words, this isn't a stunt or a knee-jerk reaction. Rizin is likely the fork you want.