[arch-general] Proposal: add "--disable-modern-top" to procps-ng configure flags

[Jonathon Fernyhough]

On 10/12/17 00:27, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote:
> Adding extraneous flags as a political decision to deviate from upstream
> defaults is itself a side effect. We will not do this without
> significantly more justification than "I dislike how it looks and don't
> want to write my own config file". In the truest spirit of Arch Linux,
> we would like "defaults suck and no one can read this garbage" to be
> fixed upstream, while Arch users will likely read the manpage and set
> their own configuration (though I personally encourage switching to
> htop, which not only fixed my gripe with top, but turned out to be the
> process viewer I hadn't realized I was missing).

I thought that e.g. accessibility and user experience was greater
justification than "I dislike it". Granted it's not the raison d'etre of
Arch but with such a small commitment/maintenance burden I honestly
couldn't see the harm in it. If I could I wouldn't have bothered with
any of this.


> You said "top sucks, let me list the reasons why I don't like it". This
> is no better!
> 
> Turning a gripe into a bulleted list of gripes does not constitute
> migrating from a gripe to a "proposal"; being a "proposal" says nothing
> whatsoever about its status as a technical merit vs. political change.

Providing an implementation with rationale (whether or not you agree
with it) is definitely not "griping".

If someone submitted a PR which changed code you wouldn't call it
political. This is no different.


> So we'd have to look at the *content* of your proposal... and there we
> hit into the issue that you just responded to by claiming that "OMG it's
> a proposal not a gripe" without actually saying anything.

I don't know what else you want. I remember (in another life) someone
saying "unless someone has a substantive reason", which really meant
"unless there's something involving money". Anything else wasn't "valid".

In this case... I don't honestly know. What could/should have been a
quick discussion has moved into what's approaching a philosophical
discussion, which certainly wasn't my intention.


> Namely, you agree it is subjective but want to argue about whether
> everyone agrees with your subjective opinion. But... Arch does not and
> never has and never will care about peoples' subjective opinions merely
> for the sake of subjective opinions. We expect people to read manpages
> and configure software for themselves. We don't add changes to upstream
> except for clearly defined reasons, and configuring things on behalf of
> the user is not one of these reasons.
> 
> So excuse me, but in what possible world did you either file that
> bugreport or start this discussion thread with the belief that you had
> any chance whatsoever of getting this changed? This whole issue
> approaches the level of a deliberate spam comment... 

"If you have a question regarding Arch development, please ensure that
your topic poses a specific question and be open-minded to responses. If
possible, provide a solution or partial solution. Submitting code and
patches for discussion is always more pragmatic than asking others to do
it for you."


> and given that you are *that* jonathon, I am not going to buy ignorance as an excuse.

Thank you.


> Awesome! So happy that a mutually satisfactory outcome was obtained!

I'm glad the discussion was productive, sarcasm aside.


J