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> If it means being useful to the people who use it, then I don't think your argument holds water

I recently worked on a project involving a couple Docker containers, one of which wraps a Postgres DB and the other extends it.

Some of the features of the extension are broken because the Postgres maintainers changed something key in their Docker image (they disabled the DB listening on localhost) and the scripts the extension generates assume localhost is accessible.

In the (volunteer, free) open source ecosystem, nobody is paid to have that be their problem to solve and so problems like that, to my observation, rarely get solved because these two groups are unrelated to each other and it's nobody's job to make sure "the whole offering" is easy to use.

(And as an ardent and frequent user of Emacs, I simply must see the config file someone claims to have put together that competes with VSCode for managing TypeScript projects. That's a hard claim to swallow without evidence; I've tried, and it's extremely non-trivial. Emacs just pulled in eglot for LSP support... Not that one couldn't self-install it earlier, but every time you have to mutate a system to one-off your own solution you increase the maintenance burden of that system.)

... I'll have to carve out some time to look at Elixir. In my world, of course, "Doesn't have a tool to compile to JavaScript that has made it to v1.0 yet" is a major strike against it, but my problem domain is specific. ;)



> Some of the features of the extension are broken because the Postgres maintainers changed something key in their Docker image…

I’m not trying to set the wrong tone here but… how hard is it to modify a docker image that is used as a fundamental part of a production system? There isn’t someone who’s job it is to wrangle these things?


Not hard; once we knew why it broke it was easy to fix. Took half a day to figure out why it was broken though.

Key thing is: these two teams maintaining two separate Dockers aren't part of the same org, so there's no incentives to align either image to not break the other. If they were commercial entities driven by maximizing userbase or revenue, there would be reason for them to minimize breaking each other (especially if they were the same company; then someone's in charge and can tell one team or the other "Fix it or you're fired").




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