On 22/07/2015 15:45, Steve Litt wrote:
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/politics_of_dependencies.htm
Yes, I had already read that, and agree with all your statements.
But it's not the same thing here, because we're talking about a
development tool. Not a dependency, not even a build-time dependency
to a library, but a TOOL.
Development tools *should* be kept up-to-date, no ifs, ands or buts.
If they're not, working on development tools becomes completely
irrelevant - if people can only use a tool 5 years after it's out, why
even bother adding features at all ?
You know I'm all for minimalism. I build some of the smallest
production images in the world ever. The skarnet.org server could run
with 64 MB of RAM, maybe even 32 MB if I didn't use it for some
experiments and for development. I designed the whole freaking userspace
on it and built everything by hand, so I know the cost of dependencies.
But for package compilation, sorry, but I'm going to allow myself to
depend on goddamn MAKE, whatever version I need to get the job done.
You think building s6 is too hard ? Go grab a random package on GitHub,
a totally random one, and try compiling it - make sure to have aspirin
at hand first. Then you can come back and thank me for making it so
easy with s6.
> IMHO two years is way too stringent a requirement.
For a run-time dependency, or a build-time dependency on an
external library that may itself depend on other stuff and make you
pull the whole plate of spaghetti, yes, yes it is.
But for a simple development tool such as make, which is completely
basic, ubiquitous and easy to install and does not depend on anything,
I'm standing my ground: it makes no sense not to be able to rely today
on make-4.0 features.
Distributions have a "security updates" feature, so they ARE able to
provide software updates more often than churning out a full release
once every three years. There's no reason why they can't use the same
mechanism for major updates to widely used software.
--
Laurent
Received on Wed Jul 22 2015 - 14:40:59 UTC