Re: Bug#139945: ITP: prokyon3 -- a multithreaded MP3 manager and tag editor for Linux.
On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 11:32:02AM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> And confrontationally pointing this out to people every time they use
> the word 'Linux' alone to refer to the OS is extremely anti-social. RMS
> is a genius and a hermit.
I have never seen a hermit travelling more, and having contact with more
persons. From all analogies you could pick, you have with an unfailable
certainty selected the most inappropriate one.
> Joining RMS's "what's in a name?" crusade isn't going to make most
> programmers care about portability. In fact, NOTHING is going to make
> most programmers care about portability, except when it's portability to
> their own platform. As someone who takes pains to make his code as
> portable as possible, I can attest to the fact that writing portable
> code SUCKS. It's a lot of work for very little gain.
Most people in the GNU project would disagree with you. GNU software is
very famous for its portability. Portability is especially important
for postmodern programmers. Beside improving the quality of your code,
it will also make your program compatible with the _future_ versions of
your operating system. So even if you only care about one system, you
should care a lot about portability.
> And while you
> can't force anyone to work on anything they don't want to in the Free
> Software community, giving them a hard time for not supporting (or
> crediting) your pet OS is a great way to trick them into /not/ doing the
> work you want them to.
I don't know of any case in the GNU/Hurd project where we asked non-GNU
projects (or even GNU projects) to support us without providing
appropriate patches. But I know about upstream developers who have
taken the initiative and fixed portability problems without letting us
work out the fix. And I know only about one serious dispute about a
portability patch. I respect your opinion, but I am also happy that
actual reality of porting free software to a new operating system is in
general well received in the community.
Thanks,
Marcus
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