Hacker News Reader

Comment by somnium_sn | Hacker News Reader

All the comments make me incredible sad. Established projects need a valid backwards compatibility policy, this is particular true for shells and programming language to not break existing scripts.

People make mistakes and it's been agreed that introducing these aliases years ago was a mistake, albeit I think back then an understandable mistakes, given the idea to bring a shell to windows that has the power of a traditional unix shell.

Now people are loudly complaining, laughing, etc but without any constructive feedback that takes the backwards compatibility needs of a tool that is literally shipped to hundreds of million of people into account and stomping RFC approaches that are pretty similar to those in other projects (see PHP RFCs, Python PIPs, etc).

Since when did people became so hostile towards open source projects that try to do the right thing?

View on HN

Powershell's "native executable" story (running things which aren't cmdlets) has never been simple or graceful [1], which means that posh scripters might call exes like curl more explicitly and avoid the alias altogether.

After months of varaible-expansion-frustration I have alnded on the form "& foo.exe par1 par2", spelling out the .exe and avoiding the alias.

[1](https://web.archive.org/web/20110726162028/http://huddledmas...)

It's hard, and I think it scales with a project's popularity. GitHub is very much susceptible to the lowest common denominator running in and yelling at maintainers. You can tell by many of the comments that both the users and the maintainers forget that they are dealing with real people. I wouldn't talk to anyone on the streets the way these people do to each other. It's also crazy because it's open source. Open source only works if people are willing to cooperate.

It's because it Microsoft, it doesn't matter what the issue is. People just want an excuse to bash them.

To be fair one of the first comments on the issue is some guy from Microsoft saying:

"We can't make this change without an RFC. Oh, by the way, the community cannot create an RFC."

If I was actually interested in using powershell on Linux I too would be a little upset they Microsoft is so unwilling to work with the community.

You are not giving the whole context:

> We can't make this change without an RFC. Oh, by the way, the community cannot create an RFC, WE INTEND TO OPEN THIS UP.

After so many years of Microsoft trying to do exactly the wrong thing towards Open Source, I can understand why people are a little slow to trust and accept them. It is in fact very wise at this point to be careful with Microsoft.

Microsoft needs to be patient and understanding of this mistrust, given the weight of history behind them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com