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On 4/20/20 5:48 PM, Georg Rudoy wrote: |
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> |
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>> I've learned the hard way that it discourages you from doing all the |
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>> things that I just said high-quality software should do. |
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> |
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> Again, ranging from one-off pseudo-scripts that I had to come back to |
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> after a couple of years, to quite complicated pieces of software |
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> running in prod and actually serving customers I had to update up to |
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> the latest LTS after 3-4 years of inactivity, I tend to disagree. Even |
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> the latter was a surprisingly smooth process boiling down to about an |
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> hour or two of very effortless, mechanical and thus boring code |
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> changes (mostly about Semigroup/Monoid hierarchy, if you wonder). |
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> |
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> This is surely offtopic, but I just don't want to silently participate |
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> in spreading things that aren't objectively true (even if they are |
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> subjectively true in your/mine/etc experience). |
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Fair enough, I was speaking only from personal experience. But if you do |
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an experiment I bet you'll agree with me. Updating your code to work |
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with the latest GHC is pretty easy. But if you wanted to write an ebuild |
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for that program, it would have a dependency on that specific version of |
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GHC, leading to these same problems that we're talking about when other |
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programs require other specific versions. |
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I can compile my C programs with any GCC going back to the 4.x days -- |
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or even clang. In the past three years, we've collected ghc-8.0 though |
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ghc-8.10 in ::gentoo. Try to make your code work with all of those GHC |
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releases at once; if you come back and tell me it was easy, I'll be |
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impressed (and may start asking you to update my Haskell code). |
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Working around something like gcc-10's -fno-common breakage, on the |
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other hand, is relatively easy. We write a patch, send it upstream, add |
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it to ::gentoo in the meantime, and everything keeps working. But that's |
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only backwards-compatible because the C standard says how it should |
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work, and the C standard doesn't change every six months to be "whatever |
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this version of GCC does." |
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To refer back to something on-topic: some projects are willing to make |
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the extra effort, and some aren't. The ones that are, are easy to |
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package and definitely belong in ::gentoo. The others... should be dealt |
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with case-by-case. But lowering the standards of the main tree should |
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not be how we get them over the bar. |
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