Respectfully, I couldn’t possibly disagree more. Everything you said is just as true for an alternative language. You can maintain compat (like rocky linux) or

Respectfully, I couldn’t possibly disagree more. Everything you said is just as true for an alternative language. You can maintain compat (like rocky linux) or diverge (like mariadb), so it remains to be seen. However the switching cost of moving your entire community is large and IRC is not stateless, pedantically it is a stateful connection, but you really mean that theres nothing you need to carry with you; but thats not true, permissions, identities, hostmasks etc. all of these tiny things spread across thousands is quite an effort and undertaking it is only done with a heavy heart. If you maintain compatibility then it could be as easy as changing a reference or just calling another compiler (like the Java implementations). Afaik all CentOS and RHEL scripts work without modification on Rocky. Either-way, I think I made my point, I am sure you are convinced of the inverse, so I leave this as my final word to other readers of the thread.