Re: Proposal: remove OSF/1 support

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 03/31, Greg Troxel wrote:
> "J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost> writes:
> > So, I think I said it in our last discussion a few months back related
> > to a security issue with OpenSSL, and I know you're looking at it from
> > more of a legal point of view, and I'm not (for better or for worse),
> 
> It would be good if you understood the legal issue.  People who do are
> offended when others wrongly assert that they have a duty.
 
Hi, Greg!

Hmm, I wish I could express a view without implying a legal meaning.  I
certainly don't want to offend you or others in this discussion.

> > but I still feel like there's some basic level of responsibility in
> > maintaining an open source software project that the maintainer should
> > take on, and I think that includes ensuring the software is secure,
> > reliable, and not breaking backward compatibility (within the same
> > major version number); and of course if it's pre-1.0.0, then backward
> > compatibility is not promised.
> 
> I continue to find your assertion of responsibility to be offensive.  I
> think it's good for people not to misrepresent things, but an assertion
> of duty beyond non-misrepresentation is a real problem.

Again, I don't want to offend, and I'm sorry to have offended you.  I
think you're doing great work on the pkgsrc project, and I appreciate
all that you've done to help make pkgsrc what it is today!

I am not talking about legal responsibility.  Maybe I should call it
ethical responsibility?  I'm not sure that sounds right either, though.
Anyway, I'm worried that this might be too hot of a topic, so I'll stop
here.  But if at some point you're open to discussing more, I'd like
that.

> If you don't want to do that, that's of course your call and I won't
> criticize you for that choice.  But please stop demanding that other
> people do things like this.

I'm definitely not demanding anything.  I was expressing an opinion,
and I said I was fine with nia's documentation approach.  And then I
expressed an opinion that an even better way to me would be to break
things into tiers like NetBSD does for ports and document that.  And I
offered to write it.

However, I can see how what I said prior to that could sound like me
suggesting that pkgsrc should support OSF/1, and I want to be clear that
I'm not saying that at all.  I was talking about open source software in
general and the non-legal-meaning "responsibility" concept.  But again,
I think I was not clear, so sorry about that!  I don't think the pkgsrc
project has a basic responsibility to support OSF/1, and you listed good
reasons related to retrocomputing.  I just thought it would be helpful
to users to be clear about what the level of support is or how well it
is expected to work or not, and I thought NetBSD's approach was pretty
good.

Kind regards,

Lewis