> The wording could have been better, but I don’t see it as a dig.
He created (or at least re-activated) a dichotomy for zero gain, and he vastly increased the expectations for what a Rust rewrite can achieve. That is very, very bad in a software project.
The evidence for both is in your next paragraph. You immediately riff on his dichotomy:
> It’s unfortunate that it would be the end of the road for them, but holding up progress for everyone to retain support for some very old platforms would be the definition of the tail wagging the dog.
(My emphasis.)
He wants to do a rewrite in Rust to replace old, craggy C++ that is so difficult to reason about that there's no chance of attracting new developers to the maintenance team with it. Porting to Rust therefore a) addresses memory safety, b) gives a chance to attract new developers to a core part of Debian, and c) gives the current maintainer a way to eventually leave gracefully in the future. I think he even made some these points here on HN. Anyone who isn't a sociopath sympathizes with these points. More importantly, accidentally introducing some big, ugly bug in Rust apt isn't at odds with these goals. It's almost an expected part of the growing pains of a rewrite plus onboarding new devs.
Compare that to "holding up progress for everyone." Just reading that phrase makes me force sensitive like a Jedi: I can feel the spite of dozens HN'ers tingling at that and other phrases in these HN comments as they sharpen their hatred, ready to pounce at the Rust Evangelists the moment this project hits a snag. (And, like any project, it will hit snags.)
1. "I'm holding on for dear life here, I need help from others and this is the way I plan to get that help"
2. "Don't hold back everyone else's progress, please"
The kind of people who hear "key party" and imagine clothed adults reciting GPG fingerprints need to comprehend that #1 and #2 are a) completely different strings and b) have very different-- let's just say magical-- effects on the behavior of even small groups of humans.
He created (or at least re-activated) a dichotomy for zero gain, and he vastly increased the expectations for what a Rust rewrite can achieve. That is very, very bad in a software project.
The evidence for both is in your next paragraph. You immediately riff on his dichotomy:
> It’s unfortunate that it would be the end of the road for them, but holding up progress for everyone to retain support for some very old platforms would be the definition of the tail wagging the dog.
(My emphasis.)
He wants to do a rewrite in Rust to replace old, craggy C++ that is so difficult to reason about that there's no chance of attracting new developers to the maintenance team with it. Porting to Rust therefore a) addresses memory safety, b) gives a chance to attract new developers to a core part of Debian, and c) gives the current maintainer a way to eventually leave gracefully in the future. I think he even made some these points here on HN. Anyone who isn't a sociopath sympathizes with these points. More importantly, accidentally introducing some big, ugly bug in Rust apt isn't at odds with these goals. It's almost an expected part of the growing pains of a rewrite plus onboarding new devs.
Compare that to "holding up progress for everyone." Just reading that phrase makes me force sensitive like a Jedi: I can feel the spite of dozens HN'ers tingling at that and other phrases in these HN comments as they sharpen their hatred, ready to pounce at the Rust Evangelists the moment this project hits a snag. (And, like any project, it will hit snags.)
1. "I'm holding on for dear life here, I need help from others and this is the way I plan to get that help"
2. "Don't hold back everyone else's progress, please"
The kind of people who hear "key party" and imagine clothed adults reciting GPG fingerprints need to comprehend that #1 and #2 are a) completely different strings and b) have very different-- let's just say magical-- effects on the behavior of even small groups of humans.