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Re: Machine maintainer veto.


On Wed, 2015-07-08 at 09:48 -0500, Steven Munroe wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-07-07 at 00:03 +0200, Torvald Riegel wrote:
> > > Like saying users
> > > are stupid and they doing it wrong is not constructive. 
> > 
> > Agreed on the "are stupid", but saying that they are doing something
> > that is not something glibc wants to support is not something that's
> > necessarily bad.
> > 
> But they you should be talking to them, explaining to them, convincing
> them.
> 
> Holding a platform maintainer hostage does not help you.

I don't think that the goal is to hold the platform maintainer hostage.
If the project, as a whole, should decide to not support something, then
it can do that.  Making sure that users at least understand the
background of the decision is worthwile, of course; likewise, serving
users makes sense too :)  However, the project must be able to make
decisions even if not all users agree with that decision.

One could also argue that users should not blame a platform maintainer
for a decision of the project as a whole -- IOW, the hostage situation
is not just due to the project's decisions.

As another example (with a somewhat GCC-ish background), consider that
likely lots of code out there assumes a memory model like x86' TSO
(e.g., some glibc code did).  It would probably be useful to many users
if we'd just promise those guarantees.  If such users would approach you
as platform maintainer and request you to give you those guarantees, I
guess you would decline this request :)  It would be even harder for
them to adapt their code for a weak memory model than in the specific
case that you want to see support for.


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