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Comment by t43562 | Hacker News Reader

I found this recently - couldn't compile it on HPUX. Trying to get rust on there would have been an absolute impossibility of course. I can get bash though, and lots of other GNU utilities - all written in C of course. Thank goodness some people care!

People who don't care about HPUX will never care about it but they would if e.g. we decided that only windows and Ubuntu were supported ... except for the windows and ubuntu python users who wouldn't care.

It's I'm-all-right Jack until it's your use case that gets bulleted.

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Hi, one of the co-maintainers of GNU coreutils here. It is nice to hear things worked on HP-UX. I don't have access to it, and I don't think the other maintainers do either. See this commit [1]. [1] https://github.com/coreutils/gnulib/commit/c599eba7bed3baa30...

Yes we're using quite an old version 8.13 and yet it does the job for our build which maintains an EXTREMELY important bit of software in public service relating to healthcare.

It's on Itanium so obviously we have to move away from that to Linux but the existence of open source tools like coreutils gives us time.

No such luck with python. We have to postpone some changes as a result.

As I say, there's some kind of effect where changes that are only negative on the margins are cheered until one finds oneself on one of those margins.

Glad you could get an older version works well for you. We probably would have tried to continue supporting it if we had access to it. I'm a bit sad I never got the chance to use it once.

  > one of the co-maintainers of GNU coreutils here

I'd just like to say thanks to you (and the rest of the team) for this foundational software which I use every. single. day. :)

Thanks for the kind words. :)

However, the other maintainers, who have been doing it for many more years than I have, and various other authors are certainly more deserving than I am. I am similarly thankful to them.

I think there’s a categorical difference between HP-UX (which seems to no longer even be maintained by HP) and something like Linux on the top 5-6 most popular architectures.

(But with all that said: there’s no ideological dispute here. If there was a reliable way to build and test for HP-UX, I assume a lot more people would declare support for it. The problem comes down to maintainers being asked to support platforms they ultimately have no ability to support, except in the weakest sense of “it compiles.”)

If it compiles then people like me can get it to work. What we cannot do is build an entire rust toolchain to make it compile.

There’s a very large body of closed issues on most popular open source projects showing that “it compiles” is nowhere close to “it works.”

When you think about GNU autotools they're all about being able to compile on platforms that the software has never been compiled on before - that's why there are all those feature tests to see what the OS and compiler support.

I've done this many times on things like AIX 4.3 and HP-UX and so on. Sometimes you can get through the compile without any problems at all and the tool often works enough for your usecase and that's a win.

Sometimes there are particular little problems, sometimes it's something serious like an actual missing C library call or whatever and then you have to do some work. With nicely designed tools that have fairly wide support to begin with this tends to be easier.

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