Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
Is there similar outrage against upstreams as well? Where is it?
On this list, it's shouted down. I commented some time ago about the
rather toxic behavior of the python developers vis-a-vis breaking
compatibility at virtually every release. You would have thought that I
had urinated in the holy water.
It's an ugly little wart on the free software movement. There's nowhere
near the incentive to take care of your user base without a direct
financial gain. Not, mind you, that commercial ventures haven't done
the same, but the consequences to them are more severe and direct.
You don't get to dictate what the upstream project's priorities are.
But it should be something open for discussion, and something considered
when integrating a package into a distribution and when/if the
incompatible changes should be propagated.
If you don't like the fact that apps break with every new python
release (I don't like it either), then pick a different programming
language with an upstream whose priorities better align with your
needs. eg, Perl or Java or OCaml or any number of other languages.
That decision would be a lot more obvious if the history of backwards
compatibility of a project was tracked publicly, perhaps with the
packagers of affected apps keeping track of the time they spend just to
maintain functionality. That would help a new user decide where to
invest his own time.
Open source is about freedom of choice & that applies to everyone,
users, developers, packagers alike. The python developers/community
have decided the level of stability they want between each of their
releases - they decided to accept a certain level of breakage. You
have the freedom to decide whether this matches your needs and if
not, no one is forcing you to use python.
It is pretty hard not to use python in a fedora or RH-based distro. Or
to use any other version than what the distro updates to internally -
which means that any 3rd party or local additions will take extra work
to keep precisely in step.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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