From: "John Ericson" <git@JohnEricson.me>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Allow building libc without generating tags
To: "Theo de Raadt" <deraadt@openbsd.org>
Cc: tech@openbsd.org
Date: Wed, 15 May 2024 11:06:53 -0400

On Wed, May 15, 2024, at 10:40 AM, Theo de Raadt wrote:
> Makes no sense to me.
> 
> We have a 1.5G source tree. All the parts must do only what _we_ need.
> We should not bend over to external requirements, which become
> unmaintained (unmaintainable) aspects outside our immediate view.  It is
> unnecessary complexity.

Fair enough! As I said in my previous email:

> It's reasonable for you all to simply decide none of this external activity is a
> valid motivation

I understand and sympathize with the sentiment. It *is* extra
complexity.

> Since we don't use this button, it won't take
> long before it gets refactored into breakage.  We refactor a lot.

Obviously, you know your repo far better than I do. I do however have a
lot of experience upstreaming "weird patches" into other people's
projects, and thus an intuition for when my upstream-unused features
last by accident versus when they bit-rot.

In this case, none of the lines of code in question are newer than 2004,
and most date to the 1990s; I am pretty confident that my feature will
last not bit-rot. Otherwise I would not have bothered upstreaming this (as I
did not bother with other patch files in aforementioned downstream pull
request).

Still, it won't bit-rot !=> you should care about this downstream
problem. I'll drop the matter now :)

Cheers,

John