Some things I intended to work on last week but did not:
- deets
- luakit
- armhf
- posh
- MTA fare helper Android app
- replying to an email
Things not to do if you want to be a good person:
- Complain privately to another person about vis public behavior
- Attempt to mediate between members of a group of which ve is also a member
- Defend anyone in a position of power for abusing that power
- Emotionally blackmail a group with a threatened resignation
One of my readers writes in that ve thinks that an egomaniac I may have mentioned previously would get upset about a perceived lack of proper attribution because ve views vis bit of code like vis offspring.
This causes me to immediately have flashbacks of poor parenting in public. Many times I have seen adults pay no attention to their children who are misbehaving, perhaps smearing chocolate on a stranger's dress or gnawing on a stranger's leg, and if such a victim either attempts surrogate parenting by kicking ver in the teeth or petitioning the parent to do something about ver, said parent will become very angry and indignant that anyone would impugn vis skills or dedication.
So when I see some coder not patch vis buggy code for over three years, yet still find enough time to be a sanctimonious prick and think that ve has the right to tell people how ve should be treated and how the code should be modified by others, I think there are better ways to view that metaphor.
On the other hand, I don't know any parents who neglect their kid for 3 years and then still want to actively direct childrearing, unless perhaps they're paying a governess.
Posted Mon Jul 12 13:32:59 2010Some time ago, someone posted to a development mailing list about a piece of code, Cc:ing some people who had modified the code in recent past. Within hours, the original author replied to complain about not being Cc'd.
Several thoughts went through my mind:
- Is this man a walking colostomy bag?
- Why is this clown proud of his code? It is sloppy and riddled with bugs, and half of the changes made to it by other people have been obvious fixes.
- Why did his parents not raise him better? Doesn't he realize that demanding recognition in this way makes him a bad person?
This is Free Software, and people are motivated by all kinds of factors. Some bad reasons include
- Recognition, praise, or other Community ego-stroking
- Gaining a competitive advantage for one's for-profit business
- Line items on one's CV
- Finding a husband
- Accumulating increased influence in other communities
Looking at it through an Open Source lens, all these bad reasons are good reasons. For whatever motives, people are getting work done and accomplishing things. Of course, there are always an irritating number of hangers-on, and people who do not actually achieve much but are filled with such self-importance that they believe they deserve to be highly influential through sheer force of will, and the majority of the Community will concede this influence to them due to a variety of flaws in the Human Condition, but I digress.
It would be nice if everyone had motives that were pure and good, especially since at least 90% of problems in Free Software projects are due to ego issues, but when the world works, the world works. So I am happy to get code contributions for whatever reason (assuming there are no strings attached). The problem I have is when people insist that their bad reasons are legitimate and should be catered to and accommodated by others.
Posted Wed Jul 7 09:50:56 2010If you find yourself trying to pre-empt accusations of unfairness by coming up with plausible explanations, this should be a clear and obvious indication that you are about to do something unfair and wrong.
If you are being accused of unfairness and are trying to think of ways to defend against this criticism, it means you probably already have done something unfair and wrong.
It also means that you probably have too much power.
Posted Mon May 31 12:45:04 2010Some people want Debian 6.0 (codename "squeeze") to be released sometime this year. Personally I think there is some kitsch value in releasing it during DebCamp or DebConf, and there is something to be said for doing it just beforehand so that everyone can break unstable into insanity while rolling around on the quad under the hot August sun. Some people want it to happen sooner, possibly as soon as possible. Irrespective of your preferences, or if you care at all, we will repeat the time-honored mantra: it will be released when it's ready.
Readiness is somewhat of a subjective measure, but we typically do not consider a potential release ready when the RC bug count is high. There are a lot of RC bugs right now. Typically these are fixed at some point by their maintainers. There are also some self-motivated individuals who enjoy fixing these bugs themselves, and this practice predates the RCBW initiative, though perhaps not to the same level of combined intensity and endurance. Then there are bug-squashing parties, or BSPs.
A BSP can be held “virtually” which means that a bunch of people get together online and say that they are having a party, or it can be at a designated physical space. I attended one of the latter type not too long ago.
This BSP was targeted specifically to newbies or people who might feel that they are unqualified to help squash bugs, but wished to learn how to contribute. Some group and one-on-one mentoring occurred, in areas of how packages are put together, how to patch things, how to submit patches to the BTS, how to reproduce bugs, and other more problem-specific topics.
I really don't know how successful this endeavor was since getting metrics on the effectiveness of teaching has been a historically difficult problem. On the other hand, we did spend a fair amount of time actually squashing bugs, which is a bit easier to assess. One problem we had was that some people liked to be loud and distracting and demand unreasonable amounts of attention for topics that had nothing to do with bugs, Debian, or free software, but we made progress regardless.
Marc Brockschmidt thinks we need more BSPs and more focus on bug triage. Bug triage can be very demotivating and many people dislike doing it. BSPs seem to have powers of motivation through group camaraderie or friendly competition, so I would agree that it's worth experimenting with.
Posted Thu Mar 18 16:59:58 2010Contrast:
This and this and this and this and this and this
versus
this and this and this and this
Posted Fri Mar 12 21:10:46 2010Every year, at least one person asks me to run for DPL. I don't remember quite when this started, but it was more than five years ago.
I have some standard responses: I don't have time to do a good job, and why commit if you know you can't do a good job? That's just irresponsible. Usually I get some feeble relativism back for that one. Oddly enough, this is the one year that I could actually make the time for it, but it is still not a good idea.
Also I do not wish to self-nominate. I am told that everyone is too autistic to understand why, so I assume that by observing the timing of nominations (in specific, who stands at the beginning of the nomination period and who waits until close to the last minute), no moro-ethical conclusions will be drawn. To belabor this point: if the culture of self-nomination were fixed, I would actually nominate people I think would do a good job. At present, I cannot, and I resent that.
Furthermore, you do not really want me as DPL. There are oodles and oodles of things I think are fundamentally flawed and I would try to fix them. I would not take advice from predecessors because I think that only perpetuates years of flawed DPL behavior. I would not entertain requests in private because there is far, far, far too much backroom discussion right now, and unfortunately it is actively encouraged and promoted by many people in power. Such departures would be extremely unpopular.
I would be pleased if Stefano runs unopposed. I think that there is a good chance he will do a decent job.
Posted Mon Mar 8 09:32:03 2010I'm a notoriously late adopter of new technologies. Sure, if I think that something is potentially a good idea, I'll go for it, but for the most part, I assume that things are stupid. I refused to use the WWW for many years, thinking it was idiotic. Now I use the WWW. I find microblogging to be inane and narcissistic at best, but I have derived mild amusement from Shaq on Twitter. Microsoft Windows is something I thought would be ridiculously unsuccessful, because it didn't do anything I would find useful.
The list goes on and on, and includes something known in the popular vernacular as “configuration management”. I've been hearing about BladeLogic and Opsware for quite some time, and idly wondering who the incompetent fools are that need something like this. Back in my day we could manage 100 servers with relative ease; no centralized authentication (because it was a running argument about whether NIS sucked more than NIS+ or vice-versa), no cfengine, no prebuilt server images or any of that jazz. If, for some reason, we needed to make the same change to all servers at once, or some subset thereof, we would just script it.
So when one of my acquaintances started raving about Puppet, I assumed it was equally pointless. We'll call him Downs. Downs exhibits a pattern of behavior where he will rave about something for a few weeks, sometimes without having even tried it first, and then eventually become disillusioned with it and start ranting with the same fervor with which he had insisted that whatever fad of the week was the greatest thing ever.
It came as no surprise to me when he fell out of love with Puppet and started raving about how much better Chef is. In case you're wondering, he still has not tried Chef to this day.
Finally someone convinced me of the value of Puppet. I do not think it is the Way and the Light, but I do see a few situations wherein it makes sense to sacrifice efficiency, flexibility, sanity, and system resources to gain a way of building a near-identical machine from scratch. Now, beyond the flaws inherent to a solution like this, Puppet does have some annoying flaws which I find unnecessary, and which Downs ranted about back when I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
I disregarded his alleged preference for Chef, but I have heard intelligent people extoll the virtues of Chef, and to a lesser extent Bcfg2. So I took a very brief look at each of those, and was pretty much horrified by what I found.
If I need something Puppet-like in the very near future, I will probably be choosing Puppet. I have no intention of running Puppet on machines I manage all by myself though.
For that eventuality I am NIHing something with what I consider a better design. The current code is published, but it does not do very much, and requires linking with libdpkg.a which does not exist in any package (but Guillem's working on that, I think).
I have no idea whether or not I'll have the motivation to finish it all by myself, but it is Free Software.
This post is intentionally weak on details, or “deets” as the kids call them.
Posted Thu Dec 24 16:00:51 2009[The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event, just like in Law & Order.]
James filed an RC bug on a package, complaining that it attempted to execute an illegal instruction on a Netwinder, running Linux 2.6.xx. This was sort of an ironic hipster tribute to the olden times when buildd admins would actually do their jobs, keeping chroots clean and current, reviewing buildd logs, and filing FTBFS bugs where appropriate, except that he didn't actually do any of those things.
18 minutes later, Aurelien replied, asking for more information in order to debug the problem.
« Teh-oh » said James, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to his Raggedy Ann doll.
Stephen suggested that Aurelien contact Vince or Steve to get access to different Netwinders, and Aurelien tried to reproduce the problem on other ARM machines unsuccessfully.
« Could you tell me the exact kernel version on this Netwinder, and the one on europa, which seems to have the same problem? » Aurelien asked James.
« Aaagh, they're trying to steal my precious bodily fluids! » hissed James, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to his inflatable astronut.
« Also, the contents of /proc/cpuinfo would be nice. » Aurelien added.
« We hates them, Clive Oven! » James announced, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to his EASY-BAKE REAL MEAL Oven.
« The Netwinder you were talking about is europa, wasn't it? Could you tell us the kernel versions on europa and elara? There's no problem on other Netwinders, so it's probably a kernel issue. »
« THE MARTIANS ARE COMING! » James cried, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to a small band of subservient deaf-mute milkmen.
« It's been more than a week since this bug has been filed, and there has been no useful information provided at all. Can anybody help? » asked Peter.
« HELLO. IS THIS THING ON? Could you have the elementary courtesy to follow up to the bugs you report? » asked Pierre.
« Bromeliads.. I'll buy you some bromeliads, » James muttered, but no one could hear him because he was talking to his ficus plant.
Loïc looked around, slipped into a cave, sprinted through a maze of tunnels, and sped in a small nuclear-powered submarine to James's secret undersea lair. Rapping on the bulkhead three times, he uttered the code phrase and James let him in.
After a conversation that took place strictly through pantomime, Loïc departed and James said, « For fuck's sake, » but no one could hear him because he was talking to a broken sonar antenna.
« Yo, James is busy, but he said that it's okay to downgrade the bug since it's not a problem with other Netwinders, » reported Loïc.
« I never said that! I don't even know who that guy is! I'm going to convert him into a kangaroo! » James sang, but no one could hear him since he was alone on a beach in Normandy.
A month later, Riku wrote to Woody, « Hey, we have this bug. Could you take a look? »
« Sure, » replied Woody, and he gave Aurelien access, and Aurelien debugged the problem in under an hour.
« Now everyone knows that europa and elara were running Linux 2.6.11. This is a breach of national security! » declared James, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to the crushed skull of a kitten who had recently been sunning himself.
Posted Thu Nov 19 18:55:26 2009Some people are going on about personal relationships again.
Personal relationships and ego are two things which I consider antithetical to free software ideals and goals, mainly because they tend to promote the justification of ownership and territoriality. In other words, they cause fiefdoms.
Ironically, the same thing results from asociality.
Posted Mon Nov 16 00:18:59 2009