Re: [gentoo-project] Corporate affiliations of Council members

[David Seifert <soap@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, 2020-06-24 at 21:30 +0200, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> On 2020-06-23 22:50, Andreas K. Hüttel wrote:
> > Am Dienstag, 23. Juni 2020, 20:48:04 EEST schrieb Patrick Lauer:
> > 
> > > (And this is why I'm against things like the current py2 purge:
> > > There is
> > > code out there that works, can't be rewritten to py3 in a
> > > reasonable
> > > time*, and hasn't been rewritten in another language yet. There is
> > > no
> > > tl;dr: I want to be lazy, so stop breaking stuff ;)
> > 
> > You gotta be kidding me.
> > 
> > If your employer wants to work on obsolete (yes) stuff, he should
> > task you
> > with maintaining it.
> > 
> > In the context of a distribution that does *not* only mean "keep
> > things until
> > they are so rotten you can't distinguish them from the floor
> > anymore", but it
> > also means fixing bugs and keeping the dependency tree in a sane
> > state.
> > 
> > So, in this case I would strongly recommend to the higher-ups of
> > A***** to pay
> > you (or anyone else) to commit to keeping
> > * not just what *you* need in Python2 maintained and working, but
> > * to maintain the whole python-related package tree in a consistent
> > state
> > then.
> > Not just complaining that others don't volunteer the work.
> > 
> > (This argument applies equally to other cases, like S***.)
> > 
> 
> So, uhm.
> I'll let you claim it was late and the beer was talking.
> 
> But that's a totally incoherent hallucination you're projecting on me.
> 
> 
> The problem with 'obsolete' stuff is that it's often very useful, but
> no 
> one wants to spend time rewriting it.
> 
> So for example, codeswarm. The log parser it uses to convert 
> cvs/svn/git... logs into an intermediate representation is most
> horrible 
> python. I've patched it just enough to satisfy my needs, so I can
> make 
> nice codeswarm videos, but upstream went dormant around 2012. no
> chance 
> of having that rewritten into py3.
> 
> Young startups like Google struggle to find the manpower to migrate,
> see 
> for example Chromium still requiring python2 because ... err... yes.
> 
> Most of the stuff from the Apache Foundation is similarly
> unmaintained, 
> but the useful parts are useful so people will use them. Rewriting
> lots 
> of enterprisey code is no fun, so it won't happen soon.
> 
> If I'm not mistaken 'offlineimap' is similarly bitrotting away.
> 
> 
> At work I have one (1) legacy bit that's used in monitoring that uses 
> python2, and it'll age out at some point and doesn't /need/ rewriting 
> because, well, why rewrite what goes into the trash can.
> (Meanwhile I don't remember any code changes since perl 5.18 or so,
> that 
> stuff Just Works, even Go is easy to update with literally 4 lines of 
> code changing from 1.11 to 1.12 - so low-maintenance things exist,
> they 
> are just old and boring and no one talks about them)
> 
> Your hallucination that we don't update things is fascinating, but
> not 
> based on any observations.
> 
> But there's one difficulty in upgrading: Some migrations are 
> destructively expensive, and can't be automated easily. It took us
> crazy 
> long to migrate everything to gcc5 because upstream was unwilling to 
> understand dynamic linking. Incidents like that make one more 
> conservative ... and it would be nice if gentoo could be at least 
> neutral and not act as a damage amplifier for such situations.
> 
> Similarly, EOL'ing python 3.5 in Gentoo ahead of upstream caused a 
> little bit of friction and forced some people to spend time they had 
> budgeted about 2-3 months later roughly now. Which doesn't increase 
> their motivation, but who needs friends when you have a nice up to
> date 
> Gentoo.
> 
> Would be nice if we could minimize churn, and have reasonable upgrade 
> paths. Then maybe our users would spend less time on upgrades and
> more 
> on contributions (or do we want to make things artificially difficult
> so 
> we can pretend to be elite?)
> 
> 
> Have fun,
> 
> Patrick
> 

Nothing here involves you doing anything to that end. Have you worked on
making py3.7-stable a thing? No ofc not, you just demand "minimizing
churn", without actually doing anything. Are you going to maintain the
web of old-versions-supporting-py2 and newer-versions-supporting-only-
py3? Again, of course not, you just demand others do the work for you.
Case in point: Not a single commit of yours that references a bug number
is GLEP 66 compliant, you continue adding ebuilds without doing a single
GLEP 81 port. It's obvious that ::gentoo is just an extended overlay for
you, because all the best practices clearly don't apply to you.