You are missing that people volunteer to do what they do. Pretty much everybody understands that. In theory somebody might do the work to test a pullup. Your message was missing the link to where you staged an update for 2021Q2 in wip and explained how you tested it on 12 platforms with 100 dependencies. Really; this is why it's hard. This has nothing to do with NASA or any other organization that might be using pkgsrc; it's a responsibility of the pkgsrc project to communicate clearly about what it provides on the supported branches so that users, regardless of whether they're an individual or an organization, can make an informed decision about which branch to follow. I think that's what has broken down in this case; it wasn't clear what the pkgsrc project provides on the stable branch. I see it as when there is Free software at zero cost, anybody using it in a professional context has a responsibility to pay attention and make their own decisions about suitability. And to contract with paid support to bring the $0 product up to the level they need. After all in the present case the OP's (who asked and did not accuse) organization is presumably paying Red Hat. It's very natural to me that an organization would be willing to pay for a license and at the same time not go out of its way to make a donation to an open-source project. Who would organize the donation at the organization? Who would decide which projects to donate to and which ones not to? Who would decide how much to donate? Who would justify this cash outflow to the board of directors? It should be exactly the same justification as deciding to use proprietary software and buying licenses. But there is a culture that it's ok to pay for proprietary software and not ok to to make payments to Free Software. That's broken, and that was my point. It's also ok to pay one's own staff to deal with Free Software bug fixes, but not ok to pay far less for maintenance support for that software. THus I was suggesting structuring something that is similar to proprietary support, when looked at by people who make decisions. And doing so in an honest way, of course. But the bottom line is that things happen when someone does them. This is true of updates in pkgsrc-current and stable pullups both.
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