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Comment by thenewnewguy | Hacker News Reader

The "fancy update policy" being 'latest FF stable uses latest rust stable', which seems like a pretty reasonable policy to me.

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I disagree. The compiler is normally something that receives major updates in every new distribution release. That's why language specs exist for.

If you are maintaining a large number of machines in an enterprise environment, you're not keen on updating half of the installed system just because you update your browser, simply because the necessary testing and fixing of regressions costs a lot of time and money for no real gain for both users and administrators.

You can have multiple Rust toolchains side by side. This is a non-issue in that case. If there's some other usecase that this breaks, I'd like to know about it and see if we can do something to improve the scenario.

The point is that, despite it being possible theoretically, the OpenBSD project does not want to take on the maintenance burden and additional clutter of having 40 (!) separate versions of the compiler toolchain in the ports tree with a new one landing every 6 weeks.

It's not reasonable at all to change the programming language you're using every 6 weeks, if you expect to be part of stable systems.

Have you ever heard of any program requiring a 6-weeks-old-or-newer version of GCC or Clang, and failing to build on older ones?

"Stable" is just a name -- Rust stable is anything but.

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