Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 30, 2022 21:21 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Packaging Rust for Fedora by ceplm
Parent article: Packaging Rust for Fedora

> In the end, unless something drastic happens the situation is in few years will be exactly as the previous poster described: graveyard of broken, unmaintainable, buggy applications.

The exact same thing that happens in distro-land, too. One simple example: cvf was small, simple utility which can verify checksums (md5, sha1 and other types of files were supported, including, importantly, .torrent files). It was in Debian and EPEL. Now… it's gone.

I can still download and use it on Windows (and I know how and why) yet I can not use it in that “perfect world” of Linux distributions (and yes, I know why, too).

Linux distros can not do anything if upstream is not supporting their creation and if upstream does support something… why would I need someone to make both their and mine life miserable?

> And it doesn’t matter if it is Rust, GoLang, NodeJS, or any other language which ignores the lessons C programmers acquired after years of very painful experiences.

If you want to say “freeze your language and don't ever change anything” then yeah, I may agree, it's one way of achieving stability. Another, better one, would be to provide stable base for development.

> What you are saying about the dominance of Android/iOS/macOS/Windows might be true with regards to the desktop/end-user operating systems, but it is absolutely not true with regards to the server installations (which is where databases are most relevant).

Servers are almost entirely useless without clients. Just a tiny part of the whole. And distributions are a tiny part of that small part. People are using Linux distros because it's just cheaper to run docker images on Linux distros than on Windows. Even on Azure. It's not because distros are better in any other way.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 0:05 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

I won’t respond to the rest of the reply (because it is mostly “And you are lynching Negroes” type of one), but this bit deserves a comment:

> Servers are almost entirely useless without clients.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-l...

When was the last time you were using desktop client for anything? It is all (or 97.6 %) HTML and Internet browsers these days, so the desktop OS is as a result mostly irrelevant.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 9:13 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (2 responses)

> The exact same thing that happens in distro-land, too. One simple example: cvf was small, simple utility which can verify checksums (md5, sha1 and other types of files were supported, including, importantly, .torrent files). It was in Debian and EPEL. Now… it's gone.

Because it was written in python 2, and python developers decided to phase out python 2.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 13:35 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Because it was written in python 2, and python developers decided to phase out python 2.

Sure. I know that distros can not do anything if upstream doesn't like to support what they wrote and rewrite perfectly working tool for no good reason when something changes in the foundations.

But if they can not do that… then what value do they give to the users? I can not rely on software which distros give me unless said software have active and cooperative maintainer… but if there are active and cooperative maintainer then why would I need a middleman between said maintainer and me?

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Nov 1, 2022 13:20 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

> Because it was written in python 2, and python developers decided to phase out python 2.

Sure, so it has absolutely nothing to do with the argument which was taken here against Linux distributions and packaging.