A new maintainer was added to the software in question who is slightly less conservative about making changes, and the problematic PR has been merged. There's no real news; just a couple frustrated people who needed to vent.
To people as lost about this as I was: ASDF here is the common lisp build system [1], not the tooling version manager [2]. Entirely my fault I was confused, tbh.<p>1: <a href="https://asdf.common-lisp.dev" rel="nofollow">https://asdf.common-lisp.dev</a><p>2: <a href="https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf</a>
For (way) more context see <a href="https://gist.github.com/phoe/7d24bdb1f2be76a02fecba8cfecbef38" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/phoe/7d24bdb1f2be76a02fecba8cfecbef3...</a>
People here should also review the follow-up post: <a href="https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/asdf-devel/2022-January/006681.html" rel="nofollow">https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/asdf-devel/2022-Ja...</a><p>This part is especially relevant to some of the discussion in this thread:<p>> I understand that confronting this issue is more difficult than talking about whether or not ASDF should be issuing a warning. But that's not the question that is at hand.
Something I have noticed. Consider the following trolley problem:<p>- The switch operator is on a bathroom break<p>- The trolley is headed for a dead-end where it will crash and cause $100k in damages.<p>- Pushing the button will divert the trolley to an empty track where it will safely halt, doing no damage.<p>- A bystander who is not employed by the trolley company happens to observe all of this<p>For more people than I would have previously expected believe that the bystander has little-to-no moral obligation to push the button (and a frighteningly large number persist even when you change the scenario to the trolley hitting someone) . Someone who <i>does</i> push the button has gone above and beyond, as pushing the button wasn't their job after all.<p>I have seen a lesser version of this in some of the discussion over the past few days; plenty of commenters basically saying that it's not the job of people not involved in ASDF to lift a single finger to help the ASDF maintainers, and that it is fundamentally impossible for someone to be wrong to ever refuse to merge a patch.<p>I suppose if we continue this analogy the argument that Stas is making is roughly "I've had to push this button like 3 times now, this is getting ridiculous, maybe if I let it crash this one time, the trolley company will stop sending trains down this track"
the discussion of "gifts" etc in <a href="https://gist.github.com/phoe/7d24bdb1f2be76a02fecba8cfecbef38" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/phoe/7d24bdb1f2be76a02fecba8cfecbef3...</a> (which is a great suggestion to read to understand what's up with ASDF) reminds of the bigger context – the ongoing "discussion" about the "responsibilities" of open source developers. i'm putting both words into quotes because it doesn't seem that the language we have even supports discussing that there's any responsibility<p>Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's weird saying comes to mind, though. “You become responsible for what you've tamed.”
I learn a lot about diplomatic language from posts like that.<p>I wonder how much time it usually takes people to write those. For me, it takes a lot of time and revisions.
Two obvious constraints in sharing software:<p>* If software producers are pushing out obviously incompatible changes (excluding Hyrum's law and <a href="https://xkcd.com/1172" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1172</a>) to consumers, the eco-system is broken. This includes SemVer-aware package managers which transparently bump up past major-version boundaries by default. (That doesn't seem to be what's happening here.)<p>* If software consumers can't handle new warnings, the eco-system is broken. This includes C and now Common Lisp.<p>Creating an eco-system that threads the needle between these constraints is an exercise for the reader. One thing that helps is minimizing the depth of dependency stack: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16882140#16882555" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16882140#16882555</a>. Beyond that, producers should be free to make incompatible changes as long as consumers can pick them up on their own schedule. Anything else is absolutely bonkers.
If someone gives you a PR that is a small, minimal change, and is backwards compatible, but fixing a load of issues because someone wants to improve their system and is often being used in tandem with yours... then you're kinda just being a troll.<p>Anything being used by other people will of course have changes. Software is never static unless you keep it to yourself in a locked basement.<p>This whole ordeal is sort of like having arguments with the wife and proving your point all the way to the divorce court, instead of just nodding, shrugging the shoulders, and getting on with life.