Support for non-unique process labels?

[Fred Hebert]

On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 3:04 PM Nicolas Martyanoff <khaelin@REDACTED>
wrote:

>
> It seems the discussion got personal, and I am sorry for that. I am
> grateful for the work produced by volunteers, and I send bug reports and
> patches when possible (as I did for rebar3 recently and will continue to
> if you are interested).
>

I'm not feeling bitter or mad about it, and am not taking it personally. I
understand all the things we don't get and can't produce, but I've also
stopped feeling a personal responsibility of producing it in my free time
as well. I'm at a comfortable place with how things are going today, but
I've stopped taking the success of the ecosystem personally, which had me
work far more unsustainably in the past.


> But it is frustrating that every tentative to find solutions for
> shortcomings in Erlang/OTP is met with a mix of denial, anger, and
> whataboutism. Leading directly to everyone writing countless hacks and
> workarounds in their own backyward because there is no point in trying
> to improve things.
>
>
The hacks and the workarounds *are* people trying to improve things. The
erlang_ls server is a huge effort that is hardly believable given the size
of the active (contributing) community.
I think that's one of the closest things I'd do to tone-policing here.
They're possibly hacks and quick attempts, but they're still attempts at
improving things. And people will keep taking it personally when
commercial-level support is expected of people giving 3-4 hours a week of
their free time for it.

For example, I do appreciate all pull requests coming in, but if what I
give in is 3-4 hours a week, sadly a solid 75% of it is going to be spent
giving support on using the tool, project management-level reviews and
guidance, and not on actually improving anything. Hacks are often the only
thing that gets through unless someone can be paid to do that work full
time.

And these issues are very well known but everyone is sort of busy with
their heads down as well.

Like for me the fundamental fact is that Erlang is still a maker community
where if you expect good things you have to put your shoulder to the wheel
in a serious way, and not a consumer community where you just pick a bunch
of random contribs and launch a product with ambient support existing. And
I don't know how to communicate that without sounding like I'm telling
people to go pound sand, but having been around for 10 years, "do it
yourself or it doesn't get done" seems to mostly be the way things go.


> And at the risk of getting banned for saying that, I am fed up with the
> old argument of Erlang not having the founding of Go, Rust, or any other
> language. Ericsson is a 40+ billion dollars company with almost 100'000
> employees. I get it, they do not owe anyone anything, and I do not mind
> sending patches when I can. But it is not a tiny startup struggling to
> pay a handful of employees to work on a platform they use, and they do
> profit directly from the open source community, so it is a two way
> street. And while I cannot know for sure about any large commercial
> support contracts (this kind of information is surprisingly hard to
> find), I would be really surprised if anyone was operating Erlang in
> critical services (starting with telecoms) without priority support
> contracts with Ericsson.
>
>
Here's the thing: I would provide full time support for Rebar3 and would
actively work to merge it into OTP if I were paid full time to do it. I'm
not. I get to spend 40 hours a week working on other stuff (Erlang isn't my
day-job anymore, I'm SRE now), and would love to spend time on some hobby
projects that don't involve debugging some company's builds. I can't say
what is needed for the rest, but I can say that from my perspective, as one
of the person who maintains significant chunks of tooling,
funding/employment as a problem is absolutely real, and even the EEF
doesn't necessarily get enough funding in a year to pay full salary I (or
another maintainer) would get elsewhere at market rates.

I can't speak to Ericsson's budget, but they're still by far the biggest
investor in this community in terms of full time employees working on
improving the language. I'm generally avoiding casting stones at the
biggest contributor and asking them to please do more, but I understand the
point you're making very well.


> I will refrain from further comments, it is clear the thread is not
> going anywhere.
>

I agree there. It's not like "having a single executable" or "just make
releases easier" aren't desirable or known. They're often identified, but
my understanding is there aren't enough hands.

I say this without any ill intent, but ideas are cheap. Execution is costly.
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