Re: guile22 -> gnutls -> lots of virt packages
On Wed, Jul 7, 2021 at 7:38 AM Hans de Goede <hdegoede(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi,
On 7/7/21 1:08 PM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Neal Gompa:
>
>> Wait, why don't we have guile 3.0?
>
> We have a mandate from Fesco that the core toolchain must depend on
> Guile. Naturally that makes updates rather difficult.
So I've gone and checked the Fesco issue where dropping guile
support from make + gdb was discussed:
https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2558
And I must say that I find the argumentation for rejecting the
change very very weak. I would really expect Fesco to make better
motivated decisions then this one.
I'm especially shocked about how Fesco is in essence mandating
a group of maintainers to spend time maintaining a feature
where they clearly have indicated they don't want to maintain
that feature.
My being shocked here is not so much about the guile issue,
but about a IMHO much bigger issue underlying this decision:
Since when does Fesco get to mandate on which features our
volunteer maintainers get to spend there time ?
I understand there need to be rules and I can understand
Fesco denying approval for enabling / adding certain
features for a wide set of reasons, thus in essence blocking
volunteers from spending time on something because that
something is deemed undesirable for Fedora.
But this is different here Fesco is telling a group of
maintainers that they must maintain a feature even though
they have indicated that they find the benefits of that
feature not worth the amount of time it costs to maintain
support for that feature. So in essence Fesco is telling
the maintainers that they MUST spend time maintaining this
even though they don't want this.
IMHO this is just outrageous and goes way way beyond the
purview of Fesco.
Now if dropping this feature would cause major breakage this
would a different story, But in the whole discussion about
this, at least as documented in the Fesco issue, no actual
users of this feature have been indentified and nothing will
break by disabling this as far is is known. So since there
is no known breakage caused by this, I end up circling back
to this basically telling Fesco that the make/gdb timers
MUST spend them on maintaining this even though they
don't want to (and have good reasons for not wanting to).
Which again, is IHMO pretty outrageous really.
Sorry Fesco, I know that you all do a lot of (hard) work
as Fesco members and do your best when making decisions
like this; and I don't doubt that your intentions where
well, but you made a big booboo here (IMHO).
I urge Fesco to reconsider this and I suggest that we
(Fedora) take another serious look at implementing:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RemoveGuileFromToolchain
for Fedora 35.
If you want to be outraged at FESCo about this, then read the meeting
log first[1].
My main point then is that *all* of the Change authors are upstream
developers in the GNU Toolchain, meaning that they have to do
maintenance effort around Guile support upstream anyway. If they want
to remove a feature that makes Fedora the best place to use the GNU
Toolchain, they should do it upstream first.
I did not find their argumentation persuasive because they used
arguments that should be applied upstream and Fedora is not a special
case for any of those.
I don't personally *care* much about Guile support beyond the fact I
have a few private projects that use it in Makefiles, so it'd be
annoying if it was gone. And I was comfortable with being overruled in
my objections. I stated as much in the meeting even!
The fact was, the GNU Toolchain developers:
1. Did not show up to that FESCo meeting to try to persuade the rest
of the group to vote against me.
2. Did not consider either alternative I proposed (remove it upstream,
split guile support out in some way)
It was *barely* rejected by virtue of not reaching a majority vote to
pass. If they want to propose it again, then be my guest.
[1]: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teams/fesco/fesco.2021-02-03-15.00.log....
--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!