> though it has already been committed to git for more than a year now and this is the first I've heard people complain about the change.
This reasoning is flawed. I only noticed it a few months back on Arch. So between the time it takes the project to make a new release and it hitting Linux distros (Debian is slower and Ubuntu even moreso), don’t expect a flood of complaints to be time correlated with the change.
I wasn't making any reasoning. I was just making the observation that this change has been staged for a while now and that I'm surprised there hasn't been more noise about it before now.
> don’t expect a flood of complaints to be time correlated with the change.
I expect complaints to be correlated with whenever a blog/tweet/whatever moaning about the change happens to trend. I don't think it has much to do with when distros pick up the change because, as I also said, I expect distros to backport the old behavior. So I think the timing of any backlash is entirely dependent on the mood of the internet hive mind.
> I was just making the observation that this change has been staged for a while now
“There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.”
Again, you're completely missing the point of the comment you're replying to: average users don't pay attention to what's being staged upstream. You're only going to get the real flood of complaints when it actually gets pushed out and people's houses start getting demolished.
> Again, you're completely missing the point of the comment you're replying to
Actually you and the GP are the ones missing my point by obsessing over a throwaway comment about this commit being over a year old. I was literally making zero conclusions from that observation. You guys are reading far far far too much into that comment. You seem to be projecting your annoyance about this change onto me as if I’m defending and supporting this change, yet literally nothing I’ve posted has supported that claim.
> average users don't pay attention to what's being staged upstream.
I’m going to assume that you skipped over my point about how any outrage will come from blog/Twitter/etc posts going viral.
This has already landed on some distros and most people, rightly or wrongly, went “meh”. If that last 30 years of the internet has taught me anything, it’s that people get outraged by posts, not by software. And the fact that youre arguing over a meta-point like when people will get annoyed, rather than discussing the technology itself, really just confirms my 3 decades of observations.
In fact the only reason we are discussing this now is because someone blogged about it and it hasn’t even hit the distro they’re using; they know about it because they read another news article who found out about it from the release notes posted on the mailing list and the authors then went back and checked the commits! Literally nothing in that chain of discovery was via experiencing the change itself in their chosen distros.
So to be clear:
I am NOT suggesting that the commit being > 1 year old means GNU have a free pass to make a breaking change. Any conclusion like that you derive from my posts are a misinterpretation and not worth arguing over.
This reasoning is flawed. I only noticed it a few months back on Arch. So between the time it takes the project to make a new release and it hitting Linux distros (Debian is slower and Ubuntu even moreso), don’t expect a flood of complaints to be time correlated with the change.