Rust compiler support works differently

Posted Dec 17, 2025 13:13 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Rust compiler support works differently by taladar
Parent article: The state of the kernel Rust experiment

> And you are conveniently discounting the opportunity cost of applying all that back porting work to something more long-term useful, e.g. adding more tests to the test-suite of the project.

Actually, I am not; I (and others here) are saying that different folks legitimately place different weights on the costs and benefits of each option, leading to different "optimal" outcomes given one's operational constraints (equipment/time/budget/regulations/etc)

...You act as if it is all costs for one option, but all benefit on the other.

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Rust compiler support works differently

Posted Dec 18, 2025 9:09 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

As a programmer and sysadmin of many years I am the one paying the costs for long term support distros existing at all, that is why I consider it all costs because I see how bad the LTS distros are at their stability guarantees and how many compromises we have to make by having to delay adoption of solutions for so many issues because the oldest LTS distro still doesn't have support for it.

Rust compiler support works differently

Posted Dec 18, 2025 13:48 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> As a programmer and sysadmin of many years I am the one paying the costs for long term support distros existing at all, that is why I consider it all costs because I see how bad the LTS distros are at their stability guarantees and how many compromises we have to make by having to delay adoption of solutions for so many issues because the oldest LTS distro still doesn't have support for it.

Sure, that's fine.

Except pose this same question to *users* of LTS distros and you'll get a very different answer.

Again, different folks place different weights on the relative importance of each of the costs and benefits.

(Personally I just ignore 'em unless there's $$$ (or a patch) attached to the problem report)