Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: repo/gentoo.git, or how committing is challenging
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2015 12:53:56
Message-Id: 567947B7.7090205@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: repo/gentoo.git, or how committing is challenging by Rich Freeman
1 On 12/22/2015 01:08 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
2 >> Or just point people at a random email, because that's about as good as
3 >> documentation.
4 > Thank you for writing up a guide/outline.
5 >
6 > You appear to hate mediawiki, but you do realize that you could
7 > probably copy/paste that email into the box and call it half-done,
8 > right? Somebody else can always come along and improve it, and that
9 > is kind of the whole point of a wiki, and of FOSS in general.
10 I've worked with Semantic Mediawiki long enough to understand that it is
11 a pile of buggy hacks, on top of a horribly bad codebase, on top of a
12 horribly broken language. Upstream developers don't understand concepts
13 like data truncation, and debugging this pile of code is going to make
14 you cry.
15
16 (Just as an example: I found a 'pathological' pageview that cost ~40000
17 SQL connections (yes!) and 90 CPU-seconds render time, server side, on a
18 4Ghz machine. Moving the database from dedicated hardware to the MW
19 server sped up page render time because the network latency of ethernet
20 becomes painful ...)
21
22 From the beginning I've suggested to use something sane, but people Know
23 what needs to be done, so there's no way to avoid such badness to
24 spread. And thus I just refuse to interact with it now, because I know
25 enough details about SMW templates to not want to stare at that buggy
26 ad-hoc mess of random again.
27
28 >
29 >> Please, stop wasting people's time, if you write code or documentation
30 >> write it once properly, don't release untested things and claim they are
31 >> an official tool, and don't ignore complaints (because they mean, as a
32 >> first approximation, that you screwed up and need to fix stuff)
33 >>
34 > Gentoo devs and volunteers are more than welcome to ignore complaints.
35 > I'll take half-implemented code over no code any day of the week.
36 Broken code is worse than no code: Now you spend lots of time on
37 debugging, instead of doing something more useful.
38
39 I'd replace gkeys-gen with a ~10-line shell script ... if I had some
40 motivation to dig through some old experiments of mine where I managed
41 to set all parameters for pgp from CLI. Which is all that gkeys-gen
42 would do!
43 > Maybe somebody isn't good at writing documentation, and we benefit
44 > from getting their contributions all the same which somebody can later
45 > follow-up on (perhaps somebody who is better at writing documentation
46 > than code). You're going to make more progress with evolutionary
47 > steps.
48 >
49 > BTW, bugs aren't complaints, and I don't really consider "complaints"
50 > nearly as useful. If you want to point out an error by all means do
51 > so. You can do it without implying that somebody somehow owed you
52 > something better. They don't.
53 >
54 I guess we fundamentally disagree - if you do shoddy work, it is shoddy.
55 I won't praise you for it.
56
57 Look, *I* spent about a working day all in all on just figuring out why
58 things don't work. Multiply by number of contributors, and it starts
59 looking really sad. Time and motivation are not free resources!
60
61 That's my time, spent to work around deficiencies I shouldn't even see -
62 if other people had done their job. And that's just frustrating if it
63 happens again and again, and instead of doing something interesting I
64 spend most of my time just being janitor and cleaning up stuff.

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