On Tue, 16 Jul 2024 at 00:26, Steve Langasek <vor...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 03:47:16PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > > Assuming that's really needed, and it's far from clear that different > > use cases should really use the exact same things, using > > network-manager everywhere would achieve the exact same result, > > without pulling in additional dependencies, and without being tied to > > the internal decisions made in Canonical that we cannot do anything to > > influence. Again, not your fault, but existing examples don't exactly > > inspire a lot of confidence in that regard: mir, upstart, unity, > > lxd... > > You could compile a similar list of software projects that were abandoned > when Red Hat stopped funding them. Or of entirely community-backed free > software projects that are moribund. I think it's prejudicial to argue that > a piece of free software should not be adopted because its development is > funded by a company which, over the course of 20 years, has made strategic > decisions to discontinue investments in other, unrelated projects.
Yes, you could compile those lists, and those items would be problematic too. That's the point made in https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/07/msg00137.html and I think it's spot-on. > Either netplan is technically sound, providing a sensible configuration > language that meets the needs of Debian users and has a high-quality code > base, in which case it should not actually be a problem for Debian to > maintain it in the event that Canonical discontinues work on it; or it > isn't, and we can stop the discussion there. Again, yes, in that case it would most definitely be a problem, as explained in https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/07/msg00137.html being saddled with having to maintain a discontinued product would absolutely be an issue, which is enough to make it a less prefereable solution, independently of whatever specific technical merits it might or might not have. In the end all these projects largely just work, in the sense of allowing to successfully achieve the goal of configuring network interfaces, so in this case other individual metrics are less important than other factors such as, how many other distributions are using it and how resilient is maintenance against shift in priorities of a single entity, which translates to, how many active maintainers and from which backgrounds are working on the project.
