Git: Introduce Rust and Announce It Will Become Mandatory in the Build System

Actually, I'm surprised HPE doesn't already ship a Rust fork, given how NonStop is supposed to be a "reliable" OS...

Platform support needs to be maintained. There is no way around that. Any change in the codebase has the possibility of introducing subtle platform-specific bugs. When platform support means that some teenager a decade ago got it to compile during the summer holiday and upstreamed her patches, that's not worth a lot. Proper platform support means having people actively contributing to the codebase, regularly running test suites, and making sure that the project stays functional on that platform.

On top of this, it's important to remember that platform support isn't free either. Those platform-specific patches and workarounds can and will hold back development for all the other platforms. And if a platform doesn't have a maintainer willing to contribute to keeping those up-to-date, it probably also doesn't have a developer who's doing the basic testing and bug fixing, so its support is broken anyways.

In the end, is it really such a big deal to scrap support for something which is already broken and unlikely to ever be fixed? At a certain point you're just lying to yourself about the platform being supported - isn't it better to accept reality and formally deprecate it?

In theory I agree with you, and code written in a platform-agnostic way is definitely something we should strive for, but in practice: can keeping broken code around really be called "good engineering culture"?

But, I wasn't arguing against noting changes in a changelog, I'm arguing against putting portability to abstruse platforms before quality.

Oh no, if only these massive companies that print money could do something as unthinkable as pay for a support contract!

It's not like older versions of git won't work perfectly fine. Git has great backwards compatibility. And if there is a break, seems like a good opportunity for them to fork and fix the break.

And lets be perfectly clear. These are very often systems built on top of a mountain of open source software. These companies will even have custom patched tools like gcc that they aren't willing to upstream because some manager decided they couldn't just give away the code they paid an engineer to write. I may feel bad for the situation it puts the engineers in, I feel absolutely no remorse for the companies because their greed put them in these situations in the first place.

Your comment is needlessly dramatic. The only hypothetical impact this has is that whoever uses these platforms won't have upgrades until they do something about it, and the latest and greatest releases will only run if the companies behind these platforms invests in their maintenance.

This is not a good enough reason to prevent the whole world from benefiting from better tooling. This is not a lowest common denominator thing. Those platforms went out of their way to lag in interpretability, and this is the natural consequence of these decisions.

I disagree. Perhaps these roguelike examples will clarify.

You can Raise Concerns towards the project. The project is mired in your concerns! The project loses 5 HP extricating itself from the muck! The project moves forward. --more--

This indicates that the project considered the concern raised and chose not to halt work over it; those 5 HP who might be impacted should continue planning for that impact. Most likely, in Git's case, that's either 'the good of the project outweighed the impact to the few' and/or 'no one is willing to commit developer/maintainer hours to us for that platform so we're bailing on it'. I haven't uncovered any evidence that they tend to lie about project motivations, and certainly I would not classify the project founder as 'uncomfortable sharing unpalatable views', so I have no evidence supporting the accusation that the Git project might refuse to consider a supported claim that has not already been evaluated.

You cast Unsupported Claims towards the project. The project's shield reflects them! You take 5 HP of Reasoning damage! The project moves forward. --more--

A politely-phrased objection is meaningless if it isn't backed by reasoning that can be considered and either accepted or rejected by a project. People do try, but disappointingly, human beings are sometimes vulnerable to politeness attacks of this sort. I can assert with near-perfect certainty that Git is not vulnerable to polite but unsupported objections.

You cast Hostile Tirade towards the project. The project casts Protection from Hostility! Your tirade has no effect. You blink away! --more--

Everyone is looking to ignore this kind of criticism. The roguelike joke makes it especially clear that the criticism was not considered solely due to how it was presented, rather than by whatever merits it may have. Doesn't matter how substantive the claims, being mean typically guarantees both disregard and eviction from the chosen battlefield.

ps. Note that in some cases, the project will abandon the requested outcome. Human beings have a certain percentage chance of sacrificing personal gain to 'reward' hostility with an outcome that is maximally undesirable to those being hostile. This can result in ending support for platforms that might otherwise have remained support, or even outright shutdown of an entire project. See also: Fez 2, libxslt, et al.

pps. None of these outcomes guarantee that they will change course, even if a perfectly-supported and politely-presented argument is made and considered. None of these outcomes guarantee that one will receive a considered rejection rather than a blind rejection, either. There is no Konami code, but one thing is certain: one cannot win an boss fight by throwing the controller at the TV.

While I love rust, I can't imaging being both sane and positive about that change.

We will see!

That's a very unkind assumption of my argument.

I ask that you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45314707 to hopefully better understand my actual argument. It doesn't involve calling anybody stupid or lazy.