On Sunday 16 November 2008 07:02, Rob Landley wrote: > On Saturday 15 November 2008 21:21:10 Denys Vlasenko wrote: > > No, it is not resolved. Be realistic. You just got a complaint > > from a user. Do you think he wrote this email just to annoy you? > > Alan Cox once told me "a maintainer's job is to say no".
And Linus said "I'm an asshole" or something close. Unfortunately, too many maintainers took these examples way too literal. :) They bitch, sandblast, and berate their users because it feels good, not because users are wrong (even though they often are). > Yes, you have to _listen_ to every complaint, but it's a judgement call which > ones to _act_ on. If you try to make everybody happy, you wind up with gnu > bloatware and _still_ up to your armpits in complaints. > > > Very unlikely. People typically wrote such emails when they > > got bitten by a problem, and in this case it is a legitimate > > problem (busybox can't be built with older uclibc), > > not a user error or something. > > No, busybox _can_, one specific applet can't. > > Most things can't be built with versions of uClibc before 0.9.26. Older > versions of uClibc were _buggy_. But making busybox build at least with next-to-latest release is a right thing to do. It's unrealistic to expect everybody to jump on 0.9.30 overnight. > Supporting older versions of uClibc in newer > versions of busybox is a path to madness, and I speak from experience here. > (I can start listing things that were broken in 0.9.27 if you like.) Supporting two dozens last releases is madness. Supporting one or two previous releases in addition to latest is not so hard, and it's more friendly to users. -- vda _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/busybox
