Deleting omgs out of Rails | Hacker News Reader

Deleting omgs out of Rails

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37 pointsiamwil19 comments

Maybe I'm getting old and humourless but I don't think omg is very funny anyway.

When I worked at a place where we peer reviewed every check-in I was taken to task at least 2 or 3 times for putting in snarky comments. I am so glad now that my name wasn't associated with something like that. I've come across similar comments in code and I didn't think it was funny at all.

Code in source control is like a tattoo. It brands you for life.

Why is this guy getting down-modded?

He is correct is he not? Those ugly comments are part of your online footprints... just like writing ugly blogs...

  -  # fucked
  +  # TODO: Clean up

A diff so petty it's almost wikipedian -- fix the fuckedness, not the language.

Rails 3 is doing a lot to "fix the fuckedness." This was a patch from a contributor, not the implementation of some kind of puritanical new policy by the Rails core team. Personally I find the all the ZOMG comments in the source code stupid and annoying. Removing them was a good idea.

the advantage of putting the TODO there is that, some IDEs and tools allow you to see TODOs across the project. Even without that it is pretty easy to grep for "TODO". Otherwise you will have to have a list : fuck, fucked, screwed, shit ... :)

  rake notes:custom ANNOTATION=fucked

ya learn something new every day.

    -  # OMG HAX
    -  # TODO: remove hax
    +  # TODO: remove hack

Agreed. Some make sense by using clearer names (an object named 'omg' isn't very helpful), but others are rather pointless. Like here, there was already a TODO so it was fine, really.

I think it's fair to say that Git is going to be a major tool for software archeology and cultural studies of our little subculture. I can almost imagine someone reading through Rails commits in 30+ years who will have no idea what a LOLCat is.

(Although I guess it's valid to wager what will last longer: Rails or LOLCats. IMHO, Rails has a slight edge.)

You seem to be assuming that git will still be around in 30 years, and that git-hosting sites will still be online with history from repositories that old.

I'm not sure I'd bet on that happening.

I don't think it's unlikely at all. Git might be succeeded by something, but certainly some projects will be around.

For example, the Emacs repository (the git clone at least. I haven't checked bzr) has commits dated before my birth. Some of the history is certainly lost due to lossy conversion. RCS and CVS never were very good at tracking it anyway. However, any conversion from git is going to have to retain full history. (why would you convert to something inferior?)

Furthermore, as git is distributed, the history of a project is fully contained within countless clones. I doubt any sufficiently popular open source project could just disappear from the internet. That's why the hosting sites don't matter either. If one goes down, it's trivial to migrate to another host.

> For example, the Emacs repository (the git clone at least. I haven't checked bzr) has commits dated before my birth.

Given that both the Bazaar and Git repositories are imported from the same source, they should contain the same commits. The earliest commit in Bazaar is:

    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 1
    committer: Jim Blandy <jimb@redhat.com>
    timestamp: Thu 1985-04-18 00:48:29 +0000
    message:
      entered into RCS
    ------------------------------------------------------------

> However, any conversion from git is going to have to retain full history.

Full, except for the bits of it that Git discarded.

I's say it's reasonable to think that it will always be around as long as someone has the code and the ability to compile it. It probably won't be the VCS of choice in 30 years, but for people with that kind of interest, I'm sure it'll be available.

And hey, storage is cheap (and only getting cheaper). Even if Github, Sourceforge, etc are gone, barring a major calamity, I think it's safe to assume there will be a backup of those somewhere, even if it's offline.

This is pretty hilarious, but before we start making jokes about how Rails is powered by LOLcats, keep in mind that all but one file touched by this commit is a test or test-related code.

Let's see his angle for doing this:

From the contributor's website (http://lindsaar.net/about_mikel): "I am a Scientologist and work full time as a volunteer for non profit organizations. It keeps me alive and I really enjoy helping people. You can see some of the work I do at the DrugFacts website."

I find it funny that the probable lone Scientologist rails-contributer finds this more offensive (or at least annoying) than all the Christians involved.

I love how you can refer to this url as well, so git like - http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/2ebea1c02

Entertaining read, allmost like they did it all on purpose, I suppose this is what will happen when the lolcats takes over.

maybe it made the original developer smile, which was probably originally worth it. I know little things can totally impact my emotional state and thus productivity.

lolwtf

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