It isn’t clear why the thread was resurrected after being dormant for ~20 months in a way that just adds drama, particularly when the codebase actually shows that it had been fixed 17 year earlier, just not marked as such.
Is there a good reason to share it here that isn’t drama-related which will make us better programmers in the future?
I thought it was particularly interesting that it was finally closed — I’ll confess I didn’t know it was actually fixed 17 years ago until the bug post just now. I had a little wave of nostalgia at the passing of this piece of programming history and thought there might be others who felt the same.
(btw — I appreciate the mindful way you asked that!)
Thanks, that makes sense. As someone who wasn’t aware of this bit of programming history, I was puzzled about the timeframes (and just a bit tired after the nix and Debian packaging threads). It wasn’t until after I posted this that I noticed the CCs on the ticket had your name on it and that it was more likely closure.
Anyhow, now I have learned this bit of programming history. Thank you for sharing!
So someone points an issue in some code, provides a patch with clear explanations and the maintainer writes:
This function is a joke. Don’t you have better things to do? It’s not worth
arguing about and so to safe me time I added a modifeed versson of the patch.
And later:
Stop wasting people’s time! Nobody cares about this crap.
Guess he didn’t go to the “stop being an asocial basement nerd” class…
I realize now he has a wikipedia page which boils down to: “he’s a good coder, but a bigger jerk.”…
Guess he didn’t go to the “stop being an asocial basement nerd” class…
Can I suggest an alternative way to think about this?
The human being in this case is paid to maintain it, and in order to get paid they need to tell their employer what they were spending their money on, and they don’t want to say “I spent that money on a joke function zero of your customers care about” – because seriously, who would?
Every single person commenting on this thread is putting that relationship at risk… for a joke. This is their life!
Can you even imagine how frustrating it must be for someone to put your fucking life at risk for a joke and then get mad at you for not getting the joke?
On the other hand, Drepper’s behaviour caused Debian and other major distributions to drop glibc in favour of eglibc, and subsequently glibc maintainership was taken over by a committee without Drepper. It wasn’t the bug report that lost him his job, it was the way he handled it (and many others).
At some point in the ticket they mention something alongside: “if it’s a joke, remove it. Otherwise if it’s left in the codebase what’s wrong with a correct implementation?”.
Also, merging such a patch would take no more than a few minutes. I doubt his employers are tracking his work to the minute, nor judging if an applied patch is “worth it”.
put your fucking life at risk
Do you seriously think that merging a fix provided by a very competent developer puts “his life at risk”? Do you think the employer will be like: “hey, you spent 5 minutes merging this fix, but it’s for a joke function, you’re fired!!!”.
If that’s your idea of employment, you must have had very shitty bosses…
May I ask why you found this noteworthy?
It isn’t clear why the thread was resurrected after being dormant for ~20 months in a way that just adds drama, particularly when the codebase actually shows that it had been fixed 17 year earlier, just not marked as such.
Is there a good reason to share it here that isn’t drama-related which will make us better programmers in the future?
I thought it was particularly interesting that it was finally closed — I’ll confess I didn’t know it was actually fixed 17 years ago until the bug post just now. I had a little wave of nostalgia at the passing of this piece of programming history and thought there might be others who felt the same.
(btw — I appreciate the mindful way you asked that!)
Thanks, that makes sense. As someone who wasn’t aware of this bit of programming history, I was puzzled about the timeframes (and just a bit tired after the nix and Debian packaging threads). It wasn’t until after I posted this that I noticed the CCs on the ticket had your name on it and that it was more likely closure.
Anyhow, now I have learned this bit of programming history. Thank you for sharing!
So someone points an issue in some code, provides a patch with clear explanations and the maintainer writes:
And later:
Guess he didn’t go to the “stop being an asocial basement nerd” class…
I realize now he has a wikipedia page which boils down to: “he’s a good coder, but a bigger jerk.”…
Can I suggest an alternative way to think about this?
The human being in this case is paid to maintain it, and in order to get paid they need to tell their employer what they were spending their money on, and they don’t want to say “I spent that money on a joke function zero of your customers care about” – because seriously, who would?
Every single person commenting on this thread is putting that relationship at risk… for a joke. This is their life!
Can you even imagine how frustrating it must be for someone to put your fucking life at risk for a joke and then get mad at you for not getting the joke?
On the other hand, Drepper’s behaviour caused Debian and other major distributions to drop glibc in favour of eglibc, and subsequently glibc maintainership was taken over by a committee without Drepper. It wasn’t the bug report that lost him his job, it was the way he handled it (and many others).
At some point in the ticket they mention something alongside: “if it’s a joke, remove it. Otherwise if it’s left in the codebase what’s wrong with a correct implementation?”.
Also, merging such a patch would take no more than a few minutes. I doubt his employers are tracking his work to the minute, nor judging if an applied patch is “worth it”.
Do you seriously think that merging a fix provided by a very competent developer puts “his life at risk”? Do you think the employer will be like: “hey, you spent 5 minutes merging this fix, but it’s for a joke function, you’re fired!!!”.
If that’s your idea of employment, you must have had very shitty bosses…