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Comment by rodgerd | Hacker News Reader

> Problem is that ARM & AArch64 were considered a "weird architecture"

The ARM world is a blizzard of proprietary, undocumented implementations with limited support for the upstream kernels, often can boot only a vendor-specific distro that is quickly abandoned, and full of boards that blink in and out of existence at the drop of a hat. It absolutely is a weird architecture.

> For users on "weird architectures" to be petitioning that a move the pyca authors are making is causing inconvenience to them is perfectly reasonable in my eyes.

Yes, this is exactly the sense of entitlement that the author is talking about when he describes the destruction of people's interest in working on open source.

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That may be true for peripherals, but all a compiler has to care about is the core ISA. The board zoo is very much not relevant.

But to meaningfully support a thing - per the original author - "compiles on a version of the ISA" (and there are many of those for ARM) - and "actually works as intended" do have to care about things like "this ARM core runs these extensions. This ARM core is really just a coprocessor to a binary blob processor. This ARM core is buggy as fuck but no longer supported by the vendor" matter. Where's your source of randomness for crypto, just as a starting point?

People want - to borrow from the BSD world - FreeBSD levels of support for specific chipsets and features, with OpenBSD levels of support for security, and NetBSD levels of portability. These are not compatible outcomes, and folks should stop pretending that they are.

> this is exactly the sense of entitlement

Now come on with your "entitlement". It's not as though we're talking about some random people who made some little package for their own use and decided to make it available in case anyone else found it useful, and now the community demands from them are becoming too much and are something they never asked for. This is a group that have named themselves the Python Cryptographic Authority and have chosen the prominent pypi package name of just "cryptography". They couldn't have done any more to encourage the broader community to depend on it and make it a core part of their stack.

In comparison, I couldn't imagine the python core team (also largely unpaid) doing this with one of their stdlib modules and then dismissing those objecting as "entitled".

(FWIW I'm not particularly interested in taking a side in this issue, but think your labelling as "entitled" is unhelpful)

I agree with the idea that it is entitled. Hell, Python itself is only directly supported on a couple of architectures and operating systems. It has even fewer "tier 1" targets than Rust does! It is made available in source format only for other packagers to use as they see fit, but it is not python's responsibility to support it. Why should a library maintainer feel any obligation to support platforms that the language doesn't provide first class support for?

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