]] Ian Jackson > This thread contains a fair few assertions that certain configurations > are `broken' or `unsupported'; but these assertions sit alongside > reports from actual users that these configurations do work for them, > and expressions of the wish that they should continue to do so.
A lot of this thread reminds me somewhat of the various people being very upset when gcc changes behaviour on something which is either undefined in the C standard or implementation defined. The other thing it reminds me of is https://xkcd.com/1172/ . Nearly any change we make has a risk of breaking something for somebody out there if our users have explored the enterity of what you can do with Debian and that has some reasonable chance of success. To counter this, we (collectively), need to do a couple of things: - Be reasonably clear about what you can expect will continue working and what configurations we actively care about even if they're not what we do by default. We care about, say, being able to run a self-compiled kernel, even if we don't require people to build their own kernel. However, we also require people to run a reasonably recent kernel, or thing won't work. Glibc has version requirements, apache uses epoll (something where we did have to wait a release to use it, because we wanted to support running a partially upgraded system). It's a two way street and both we as a project and our users need to be reasonable.[*] - When we change the expectations and the operating envelope, we need to communicate that. We also need to (whenever at all possible) provide a migration path. In some cases, we might be able to say «you can run with your old setup, but then you have to do those five steps for it to continue working». The 300loc initramfs elsethread is an example of this: You can have (almost) no initramfs and then you can continue with your /usr and / on separate partitions. Again, people need to be reasonable and constructive. Labelling initramfs as «evil» is not. What we can't do is to stop making changes because it might break configurations, especially configurations we don't know about. That's how this has «always» worked. We make changes, if it breaks something people use, you get bug reports and work it out from there. [*] «Reasonable» is hard to define, which is part of the reason we end up with those arguments. I don't have a good test for reasonableness outside of human judgement. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
