It's to a "test balloon" if you have a plan to mandate it and will be announcing that. Unless I suppose enough backlash will cause you to cancel the plan.

It's literally a test of how people will react, so yes, finding out if people will react negatively would be exactly the point of doing the test in the first place. Would you prefer that they don't publicize what their follow-up plans would be to try to make it harder to criticize the plans? If you're against the plan, I'm pretty sure that's the exact type of feedback they're looking for, so it would make more sense to tell them that directly if it actually affects you rather than making a passive-aggressive comment they'll likely never read on an unrelated forum.

> It's literally a test of how people will react

What's there to test? It was obvious that the reaction would be overwhelmingly negative, so that's definitely not something they would care about. What else?

Is the reaction overwhelmingly negative? I haven’t read all of the emails but they seemed basically neutral or positive to me. Could you link me to some extremely negative ones, I’m curious.

The only reactions I was seeing were overwhelmingly negative. Just random people on Twitter.

While I love rust, I can't imaging being both sane and positive about that change.

Ah, so the people whose opinions they care about is going to be git contributors, not random Twitter users (some of whom can literally make money from outrage farming). The folks who actually do the work.

If they’re running the project with a Linus-type approach, they won’t consider backlash to be interesting or relevant, unless it is accompanied by specific statements of impact. Generic examples for any language to explain why:

> How dare you! I’m going to boycott git!!

Self-identified as irrelevant (objector will not be using git); no reply necessary, expect a permaban.

> I don’t want to install language X to build and run git.

Most users do not build git from source. Since no case is made why this is relevant beyond personal preference, it will likely be ignored.

> Adopting language X might inhibit community participation.

This argument has almost certainly already been considered. Without a specific reason beyond the possibility, such unsupported objections will not lead to new considerations, especially if raised by someone who is not a regular contributor.

> Language X isn’t fully-featured on platform Y.

Response will depend on whether the Git project decides to support platform Y or not, whether the missing features are likely to affect Git uses, etc. Since no case is provided about platform Y’s usage, it’ll be up to the Git team to investigate (or not) before deciding

> Language X will prevent Git from being deployed on platform Z, which affects W installations based on telemetry and recent package downloads, due to incompatibility Y.

This would be guaranteed to be evaluated, but the outcome could be anywhere from “X will be dropped” to “Y will be patched” to “Z will not be supported”.

If you're looking for reasons to ignore criticism like this then you were never interested in anything other than an affirmative nod and pat on the back in the first place.

That's fair, but I also don't think that nuance somehow makes it less of a "test balloon".

They did expect backlash, so I believe no amount will cause them to cancel. Rust fanboys() thrive off backlash.

() am myself. Love rust. Hate rust rewrites.