On Sat, 22 Feb 2025 18:31:30 +0100
Martin Steigerwald <martin@???> wrote:

> What could have been done with that amount of time? Probably Debian
> could travel to the moon all by itself already.

There are personality themes running through humans. For technology
enthusiasts it is high trait openness. This, and with others, means
there is appeal to the authority of a theory even when the
implementation requires suffering, or burning everything else down and
building from the ashes. But why, you asked...

First to cast a wide net. For people like the above who also have
broader thinking, the post-mortem success on other things with that
zeal justifies the same zeal for new things. What must be
understood is this is for the general concept of "do new things" and not
for "do similar things which have an established lineage of being worth
the work". Again, I'm talking about fundamental underlying human
traits.

Notably you will find that the proved value of established things is
less obvious to the young and youthful (and others I won't get into).
Whenever you see such wtf technology decisions, look at the age and
youth of those in agreement and also try to understand their underlying
exploratory human nature. It's a fun game to test the argument with.

So an argument is that things like usr-merge are arguably not being
done with the same level-headedness as other things like fixing a bug.
Once again, these things are done with the "burn it all down, I have a
cool idea" which both disregard established successes and drag their
whole audience of users down with them into an experimental fog. But
how is it possible for people to volunteer so much of their personal
time to veer away from established success when their time is arguably
strongly needed elsewhere? Most especially when it's argued by their
very users?

The things that drives this sort of person drives them to do many
things: Ideology and inspiration. We work for free when we *believe*.

Even if it's a manipulated philosophy, demonstrably incorrect, or has
been done before and failed in every variation.

I once wanted to see the birth of a Linux distribution which rewrote
all shell scripts into Ruby. I mean, seriously? Past self had strange
ideas.


--


I don't know how to best put this for the list: Be careful to not think
too deeply on this.