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Comment by morelisp | Hacker News Reader

Since -reuse was added in August and originally planned much earlier, it's unclear what Drew actually did, if anything, to speed this up.

In the meantime, he has opted to... only solve the problem (if such a problem exists) for only SourceHut.

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I think the main thing is communication: it's now communicated they're actually working on the problem, and have been for a while. That was pretty unclear before.

A few years ago we had some serious issues in our production servers; shortly before it had all been converted to k8s by one sysops guy, and while I could do some things with it, I was (and remain) far from an expert, so I contacted the guy who set it all up to ask for help. He proceeded with some explanations and then ... just disappeared. Crickets. I had no idea if he was working on it or not. I didn't have time to sit down with a cup of coffee to carefully read documentation and try things out – our fucking production servers are down! I had no idea if he was looking in to it, doing something else, went grocery shopping, was having a wank, or what. No one in the team could contact him.

It was very frustrating (the joys of remote work...) Just a simple "I'm looking in to it" would have sufficed. I didn't need any details, you can tell me those later, just tell me you're working on it.

This situation is kind of similar: there wasn't any real indication it was being worked on at all, or even that people were considering working on it. There was some discussion, and then just ... nothing. It turned out it was being worked on – but that really wasn't obvious. It seemed like the issue was essentially ignored. It wasn't, but that's how it appeared.

A lot of frustration could have been avoided by communicating a little bit better. These sort of things often fall by the wayside, because none of us are telepathic (AFAIK anyway) and people misjudge "oh, I thought that was obvious for you" all the time.

did you read the update in the article? The Go team contact him directly and in private, as well as accepted responsibility for the situation regarding all small sites, not just SourceHut. So his actions did have an impact.

I did read it. I also read Go 1.19's release notes when they came out. I also read rsc's reply to the original post. I cannot figure out how Drew went back in time to add -reuse to Go 1.19 and proxy improvements to the Go team's schedule prior to the Go team contacting him in private.

> Drew went back in time to add -reuse to Go 1.19 and proxy improvements to the Go team's schedule

where did anyone say that?

You did, when you wrote the words "Because of his actions", is I think what they're saying.

Yes. As far as I can tell, the only relevant action sr.ht did was to open #44577 originally. Everything else since then appears to be sound and fury.

well, he could have done nothing, and where would we be? if you say "exactly where we are now", I think you are being dishonest with how the situation played out.

No, he didn't write the code or make the schedule, but he stood up and said "this is not right", and took steps to protect his and other small sites.

To be clearer: I think what's being said upthread is: Go was making this change anyways.

(I have no idea if that's true.)

I think the context you're missing is that Drew caused a stink about this already back in 2021, the blacklisting was just the last iteration of the saga. So I'm not sure if his posting caused the Google team to rethink their stance, but it certainly caused quite a bit of bad publicity for Google.

This is indeed the main difference. The reason that agreed that the plan was suitable was the combination of the ongoing work on incorporating -reuse with the Go module mirror and the Go teams decision to accept responsibility for the traffic and to exercise their discretion in moderating it for each affected third-party without requiring them to explicitly reach out to Google to opt out. Russ also graciously elaborated on the engineering thought-process going on within the Go team the implications of disabling the refresh on third-parties, which had not been done prior to our communications in the past couple of weeks.

There's still work to be done, but so long as work is moving forward and the Go team is communicative and pro-active about addressing the problem, then our concerns were satisfied, and I'm glad that we were able to address the issue.

Go didn't just add the reuse flag, they broke the 1.19 feature freeze to get it pushed through and even mentioned Drew's original issue in that request. Drew rejected this temporary solution loudly for many years on principle only to take the temporary solution as the permanent solution was on the verge of becoming reality.

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