Compiler and language stability guarantees instead of LTS

21

The distros didn't invent those problems, it's what the users require, and the whole reason the distros exist. Because for a sysadmin, your software has a long term security support, or it's not going to be installed here.

Now I get that as a developer, you are mainly concerned with “day 0” and don't want to deal with years old versions. And that's all right. But as a sysadmin I am mainly concerned with “day 2”, and that means touching the working system as little as possible. Which means I want security fixes only—a LTS version. New features always require additional testing and companies tend to cheap out on that, so things are rarely updated often in production.

That's where the stable distributions come in. They provide security support for a lot of software the upstream authors don't. Don't tell them how to do their job, they've been doing it for 30 years, and don't make their life harder—Rust is already making their life hard enough by not supporting dynamic linking.

1 Like
22

Security fixes are just as likely to break things and security fix backports even more so than new features that you don't use as end user. Especially when backporting over several years worth of internal refactorings, many of which are actually hard requirements for soundness fixes in the case of rustc and thus would need to be backported too.

5 Likes
23

The trouble is that it's not what users require. Users require three things:

  1. Nothing that they like changes.
  2. Everything that they don't like gets changed for the better.
  3. Nothing gets changed for the worse.

Distros try to approximate this with "everything gets frozen in place, and only changes on big version bumps", but this isn't what users want, either. Developers tend to prefer approximating this with frequent releases, and undoing changes that aren't popular, but that conflicts with the distro efforts to meet user requirements.

But both of these are approximations to the underlying requirements, which are unique per-user, since each user has a different set of "things I like", "things I don't like" and "changes for the worse".

12 Likes