Soller: Real hardware breakthroughs, and focusing on rustc

Posted Dec 5, 2019 14:46 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Soller: Real hardware breakthroughs, and focusing on rustc by joib
Parent article: Soller: Real hardware breakthroughs, and focusing on rustc

Community distributions accept pretty much everything, they are *community* distributions, anyone who care about anything can get his pet thing added to the distribution just by joining if he can’t find anyone else to do it for him.

Distributions, however, have minimal standards to retain the trust of their userbase.

Anything that needs too much work, to attain those standards, will get kicked outside distros, just because no one wants to work on it.

That’s why alternatives to gcc, make and shell get not traction. dev-only tech, that only helps devs, and makes everyone except devs miserable, won’t be adopted by anyone except devs. If those devs want their stuff to get into distributions, they can do the work themselves, or make it easier for others to do this work.

If those devs don’t want to do the work, and don't want to help others do it, they can stop moaning distributions are unfriendly, and prepare for world where the thing they deploy on is controlled by Apple, Google or Microsoft, and they need to construct all the parts over this proprietary baseline in Linux From Scratch mode, depending on proprietary cloud services.

Devs can certainly kill distros. So far, they haven’t demonstrated any working plan once this is done.

Soller: Real hardware breakthroughs, and focusing on rustc

Posted Dec 5, 2019 15:11 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> If those devs want their stuff to get into distributions, they can do the work themselves, or make it easier for others to do this work.

That's a key point -- Traditional distributions do a lot of work integrating a large pile of unrelated code into a mostly-cohesive (and usable, and maintainable) whole. Application (and container) developers rely heavily on that work, allowing themselves to focus on the stuff they care about (ie their application)

If those distributions go away, that low-level systems development and integration work still needs to get done by _someone_, and to be blunt, application developers have shown themselves to be, even when willing, to be generally incapable of doing this work.

Oddly enough, the developers that are both willing and capable seem to recognize the value (and time/effort savings) that distributions bring to the table -- because without the distros, the developers would have a lot more work on their hands.