> I think the whole message would be more palatable if it weren't written as a decree including the dig on "retro computers", but instead positioned only on the merits of the change.
The wording could have been better, but I don’t see it as a dig. When you look at the platforms that would be left behind they’re really, really old.
It’s unfortunate that it would be the end of the road for them, but holding up progress for everyone to retain support for some very old platforms would be the definition of the tail wagging the dog. Any project that starts holding up progress to retain support for some very old platforms would be making a mistake.
It might have been better to leave out any mention of the old platforms in the Rust announcement and wait for someone to mention it in another post. As it was written, it became an unfortunate focal point of the announcement despite having such a small impact that it shouldn’t be a factor holding up progress.
Not just really, really old, but they in fact have long since been depreciated in any semblance of official support.
I get the friction especially for younger contributors, not that this is the case here. However there are architectures that havent even received a revision in their lifetime which old heads will take as personal slights for which heads must roll when presented with even the slightest of inconvenience for their hobbyist port.
I haven't seen any complaints from anyone who uses those ports personally. I would bet there's someone out there who uses Debian on those platforms, but 100% of the complaining I've seen online has been from people who don't use those ports.
It's the idea that's causing the backlash, not the impact.
> The wording could have been better, but I don’t see it as a dig.
He created (or at least re-activated) a dichotomy for zero gain, and he vastly increased the expectations for what a Rust rewrite can achieve. That is very, very bad in a software project.
The evidence for both is in your next paragraph. You immediately riff on his dichotomy:
> It’s unfortunate that it would be the end of the road for them, but holding up progress for everyone to retain support for some very old platforms would be the definition of the tail wagging the dog.
(My emphasis.)
He wants to do a rewrite in Rust to replace old, craggy C++ that is so difficult to reason about that there's no chance of attracting new developers to the maintenance team with it. Porting to Rust therefore a) addresses memory safety, b) gives a chance to attract new developers to a core part of Debian, and c) gives the current maintainer a way to eventually leave gracefully in the future. I think he even made some these points here on HN. Anyone who isn't a sociopath sympathizes with these points. More importantly, accidentally introducing some big, ugly bug in Rust apt isn't at odds with these goals. It's almost an expected part of the growing pains of a rewrite plus onboarding new devs.
Compare that to "holding up progress for everyone." Just reading that phrase makes me force sensitive like a Jedi: I can feel the spite of dozens HN'ers tingling at that and other phrases in these HN comments as they sharpen their hatred, ready to pounce at the Rust Evangelists the moment this project hits a snag. (And, like any project, it will hit snags.)
1. "I'm holding on for dear life here, I need help from others and this is the way I plan to get that help"
2. "Don't hold back everyone else's progress, please"
The kind of people who hear "key party" and imagine clothed adults reciting GPG fingerprints need to comprehend that #1 and #2 are a) completely different strings and b) have very different-- let's just say magical-- effects on the behavior of even small groups of humans.
The wording could have been better, but I don’t see it as a dig. When you look at the platforms that would be left behind they’re really, really old.
It’s unfortunate that it would be the end of the road for them, but holding up progress for everyone to retain support for some very old platforms would be the definition of the tail wagging the dog. Any project that starts holding up progress to retain support for some very old platforms would be making a mistake.
It might have been better to leave out any mention of the old platforms in the Rust announcement and wait for someone to mention it in another post. As it was written, it became an unfortunate focal point of the announcement despite having such a small impact that it shouldn’t be a factor holding up progress.