Linux and the 'clssic' computing world

[David Brownlee]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2021 at 11:39, Peter Corlett via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 10:18:51AM +0200, Sijmen J. Mulder via cctalk wrote:
> [...]
> > It's especially frustrating when, after having put in the work, projects
> > refuse even trivial patches for Solaris and derrivatives or sometimes even
> > BSDs because 'who uses that anyway'. (I include the patches in pkgsrc
> > instead.)
>
> Solaris is owned by Oracle, a bunch of litigious bastards who readily
> freeload off Linux and other Open Source projects but are rather reluctant
> to give back much beyond gateway drugs to their closed-source offerings. I
> note the existence of CDDL which appears deliberately designed to clash with
> the GPL. That sort of thing can leave a nasty taste in the mouth.
>
> The specific details differ, but this basically also applies to Microsoft
> and Windows.

I think "Solaris and derivatives" was a easier way than saying
SmartOS, Illumos and OpenIndiana as well as any poor souls running
Solaris (some of which may be running older versions on Sparc kit)

> Anyway, this hypothetical patch submitter has apparently put in minimal
> effort ("trivial patches") and now implicitly expects the project maintainer
> to integrate it immediately, and then do the thankless task of maintaining
> and testing it indefinitely on (multiple releases of) a closed-source
> platform which is actively hostile to their work. For free, presumably.

I'm... pretty sure SmartOS/Illumos are actively friendly to open
source work - last I checked Joyent provided pkgsrc config to build
around 20,000 packages and had a policy of trying to feed back changes
upstream https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-illumos/

> To a rough approximation, nobody uses Solaris. It's not a good use of any
> developer's time to support it unless they're being paid to do so.

You could easily s/Solaris/Solaris,BSD,non(x86,arm,riscv),etc/

Its obviously entirely up to the members of a project to decide on
what to spend their time, and specifically what they are interested in
supporting, though if there is an active policy to not want to support
certain platforms it would help to have a specific statement in the
README to avoid other people wasting their time and annoying project
members by sending in unwanted patches and then complaining that the
patches are being ignored.

If its a matter of the patches needing more work, then that's always a
perennial problem, for just about all platforms and projects. Maybe
submitters of patches orm some platforms need to do more work, so they
should be told that

tl;dr if there are hoops to jump through for some platform patches,
indicate the hoops. If the path is closed, make it clear up front..

David