Hi, > [forking to -devel] > > On Wed Dec 11, 2024 at 11:15 AM CET, Holger Levsen wrote: > > On Tue, Dec 10, 2024 at 09:38:57PM +0100, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote: > > > > On Sat Dec 7, 2024 at 5:15 AM CET, Paul Wise wrote: > > > > Probably adequate is the logical place for this test, but adequate > > > > doesn't build/run on ports architectures since it moved to golang, > > > > so piuparts should probably keep its tests on those arches until > > > > adequate moves to a more portable language or golang gets ported. > > > that's because unsupported ports architectures have not caught up to go > > > 1.21, > > > which was released ~1.5 year ago. I'd claim that that says more about the > > > viability of those ports, than the suitability of go for Debian tooling. > > > if you > > > feel strongly otherwise, I'd be happy to continue this discussion with a > > > wider > > > audience at <d4cwm2ujbxds.339ws39vnm...@debian.org> rather than reply here > > > > I dont feel strongly about this, but I'd like to point out that I > > disagree. IMO it was wrong to rewrite adequate (as any central QA tool > > for Debian) in a language which is not available *everywhere*. > > I'd like to discuss this with a focus on general principles, and only discuss > specifics (adequate, golang) to the extent that it helps reason about general > principles.
I don't have the full context here, but to me it seems fine to use various programming languages for the tools. The language landscape is not like version control, where one solution (git) is by far more popular than anything else, and using an obscure alternative would be bound to cause friction to everybody else. If acceptable languages is reduced to a list of top-10 or top-5 on basis of general popularity, the specific language here (Go) would be on it. If the list had certain criteria, such as support for (almost) all Debian architectures, Go would still be on the list. I am not young anymore, but I and young enough to not have learnt Perl in the 90s, and if I see a Perl tool in Debian, I tend to not contribute to it. My own preference is Python, but I see a lot of good tools being written in Go and in Debian we have multiple recent new and very capable contributors doing stuff in Go (Thanks Serafi for adquate! Another is Nicolas who wrote lintian-ssg in Go). I am happy to touch occasional Go stuff to help grow the Debian community, or any other language that is reasonably mainstream and has the full toolchain packaged and maintainer team in Debian.
