building from source has uses which you believe are worthless and other people don't think are worthless.

Anyone who uses cargo or installs a module for golang is building from source. But that, probably, is considered useful. It's only people who build C code from source who are niche and wierd. ....

I've done this many times on things like AIX 4.3 and HP-UX and so on. Sometimes you can get through the compile without any problems at all and the tool often works enough for your usecase and that's a win.

Sometimes there are particular little problems, sometimes it's something serious like an actual missing C library call or whatever and then you have to do some work. With nicely designed tools that have fairly wide support to begin with this tends to be easier.

Nevertheless I remember lots of my friends who started off saying Linux was hopeless and ended up using it and Ubuntu was their gateway. The Linux world now is full of people who are fairly conformist and don't care about how it all began and who don't value the idea that open source has margins from which who knows what world beating things might eventually come. The fact that margins can exist is what makes open source great.

It's on Itanium so obviously we have to move away from that to Linux but the existence of open source tools like coreutils gives us time.

No such luck with python. We have to postpone some changes as a result.

As I say, there's some kind of effect where changes that are only negative on the margins are cheered until one finds oneself on one of those margins.

I'm not a Gentoo user BTW but I do think building from source is attractive for the same reasons cargo (Isn't that build from source mostly?) and go do it.

The Ubuntu users are only there because after they had told the rest of us how silly we were for using Linux they eventually had to use it themselves for work.

Now we're going to listen to that sort of stuff again without rolling our eyes? ....

People who don't care about HPUX will never care about it but they would if e.g. we decided that only windows and Ubuntu were supported ... except for the windows and ubuntu python users who wouldn't care.

It's I'm-all-right Jack until it's your use case that gets bulleted.

Linux wouldn't exist if people submitted to that argument.

Us little guys probably want to hear the contents of those meetings so we can check that they do make sense. Private influencing is dangerous.

We also don't want people going from the Ministry of Defence or the Army straight into working for a defence company - that should be illegal and yet it happens a lot here in the UK.

Civil servants and politicians should get a comfortable pension and be unemployable for 3 years after their term.

  - they're larger
  - to fix a security bug you have to recompile them, you can't just update the  relevant library 
  - a program not written in go can't use a go library

On the other hand a build system that only does silos, assumes some packaging system and is monolingual has limited applicability.