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> How is the author resistant to change? I specially quoted the section head "curl sits in the boat" and the entire section ends with "We sit still in the boat
by devy 10y ago
> How is the author resistant to change?
I specially quoted the section head "curl sits in the boat" and the entire section ends with "We sit still in the boat. We don’t rock it". Now read it again, and then tell me if that's welcoming changes or resisting changes.
> He specifically said someone has or would write a competitor to curl in Rust or some other safer language and that a good one will take off. He welcomed that.
Sure there might already be some alternatives out there. But those are not curl, they are at most forks.
> He specifically says that given a fresh start with the availability of these languages he might use something besides C.
Nope, he used the word "Maybe. Maybe not." Might is a stronger word.
- cestith 10y agoHaving no plans to change curl within itself is not a resistance to change in general. Not everything is a dichotomy. One doesn't have to be for all change or against all change. One can choose which things need to change.
- kelnos 10y agoI see "we don't rock the boat" as completely synonymous with "I am resistant to change". (Note that I suspect you think that I or the original poster are suggesting that he's resistant to all change, not just change within curl. I don't believe he's resistant to all change, but I do believe he's resistant to change within curl, which is what we're talking about here.)
- cestith 10y agoHe's not resistant to change in the problem space. He's resistant to very particular types of change in one very particular codebase, and for very sound reasons. He doesn't want to break the ecosystem around curl, which is huge, while getting back to feature parity and compatibility during a full rewrite. Something that comes along and replaces curl externally needn't be completely compatible and therefore is freer to leverage their new, fresh start much more fully. He welcomes a competitor, which means even a possible complete replacement. That's not a resistance to change. That's being very judicious about what one changes and why.
- devy 10y ago> He doesn't want to break the ecosystem around curl, which is huge, while getting back to feature parity and compatibility during a full rewrite Very good point! However, rewrite doesn't have to break the existing ecosystem and it can happen in a parallel track right? (curl has had 1.5k contributors so far so the community should have enough support to maintain existing codebase while developing new version on a new programming language hypothetically speaking.) In fact, I would argue that the "it works now and has been working for 15 years so we don't rock the boat" attitude is negatively impacting the curl ecosystem in the long run. I'm a python developer, a good example I can give you to support my view is the python 2.x to py3k transition (If the "better unicode support" is analogous to "memory safety bug avoidance"). [1]: https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/docs/THANKS https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/docs/THANKS
- cestith 10y agoPython 2 to Python 3 was basically world-breaking for many projects. Most every non-trivial piece of code needed to be modified to work with 3. Many people maintain older code on 2 to this day even with newer code being written on 3 by the same people. Is that what you're wanting for curl?
- cat199 10y agoThis presumes the boat is going nowhere...