When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? [LWN.net]

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 8:57 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? by pizza
Parent article: Getting extensions to work with free-threaded Python

> Actual RHEL customers pay a lot of money for this work because they find it valuable

Because they find it valuable to have someone to blame, not because the actual work is valuable. RHEL is one of the most painful distros to use and administer out of all I have ever used and things break much more often than on e.g. Debian despite RHEL having a small fraction of the packages.

> And as an aside, everyone who uses CentOS, Alma, Rocky, or any of the zero-cost RHEL rebuilds also finds it quite valuable, but for some reason feel entitled to get it all for free

Mainly because they need to be compatible with RHEL for some requirement dictated externally (e.g. build some binary to run on RHEL, some driver is only developed for RHEL,...) not because those distros are easy to use or even particularly stable.

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When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 14:03 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Because they find it valuable to have someone to blame, not because the actual work is valuable.

Make up your mind; either what they provide is valuable, or it's not.

Keep in mind Red Hat is bringing in about $6.5 billion in annual revenue; that works out to somewhere between 2.3 million and 32.5 million individual RHEL licenses (using the $200->$2800/yr fees they list on their web site).

> Mainly because they need to be compatible with RHEL for some requirement dictated externally (e.g. build some binary to run on RHEL, some driver is only developed for RHEL,...) not because those distros are easy to use or even particularly stable.

There you go redefining terms again. ISVs and end-users clearly find that multi-year supported "stable" target to be quite cost-effective, and definitely more so than the alternatives.

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jul 3, 2025 8:14 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Keep in mind Red Hat is bringing in about $6.5 billion in annual revenue; that works out to somewhere between 2.3 million and 32.5 million individual RHEL licenses (using the $200->$2800/yr fees they list on their web site).

Sure, but presumably a certain number of these licensees run RHEL not because they think RHEL and its policies are the bee's knees, but because they're really interested in running something else that requires them to have RHEL underneath it, so they don't really have a choice in the matter (and the “something else” is so expensive that the RHEL licenses disappear in the noise floor).