Re: mktool support for fetch

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

pin <voidpin%protonmail.com@localhost> writes:

> Where is democracy when the majority votes yes and the result is still no?

First, I am no longer on pkgsrc PMC and am thus just a regular pkgsrc
developer.

Second, pkgsrc has not operated on majority voting, ever, to the best of
my knowledge.  It operates mostly by rough consensus and PMC decides
when that doesn't work.

If there are strong opinions on both sides that's a clue that we either
don't yet understand each other or that we have fundamentally
differerent judgements or values.  None of those is a good situation.


Responding to what Greg Woods said here so I send fewer emails (really,
I'm trying ;-): I have no dislike of rust the language.  My concern is
that there is no implementation of rust which is

  - good enough that 99.5% of people who write in rust consider it good
    enough, and a fatal problem in a rust program if it doesn't work
    with that implementation

  - can run on every platform out there that can run modern UNIX (32 bit
    or higher CPU with memory management basically), except maybe VAX
    (which lacks IEEE754 floating point).

  - can be built for every such platform reasonably, without needing a
    binary bootstrap chain

and thus it is not possible for a program in rust to have reasonable
portablity properties.

This is a fundamental and serious difference of opinion (values) with
rust culture, which seems to think it's ok to have a single
implementation that runs on only some systems, and has a vast binary
bootstrap chain, basically saying that any computer not supported by
rust is unsuitable for general computing.   I remain boggled at how
people can think this is ok.


> This doesn't sound "correct". I fully understand your (and others)
> reasons but, if I still can count, most would like to have this. I
> would respekt if the majority said no but, this is not the case.
>
> The rest is irrelevante.

You have spoken in favor of adding code to pkgsrc that can run only on
a limited set of platforms, when others have said this creates a risk
(or high likelihood) that over time we will end up with it being the
standard/only approach.

Do you believe that is untrue, or do you think it's ok if only a few
majority platforms can be used to develop for pkgsrc, or something else?