Since SVN revision r4027 source code is personally insulting me (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Since SVN revision r4027 source code is personally insulting me (2008)

bugs.debian.org

35 points658120 comments

Consider the amount of effort collectively spent by people in that thread trying to justify not spending the time to modify a single line of code, where the fix is just to substitute in any other meaningless string placeholder. Any single person involved could have applied the fix in several orders of magnitude less time than they spent typing a reply.

I mostly skimmed the inane discussion, but I think at one point someone was trying to make the argument "if we're going to fix this, we also have to fix every occurrence of profanity within the entire Debian codebase"?

Given that was 12 years ago, it would be interesting to hear the same people's current reactions to their response at the time.

>where the fix is just to substitute in any other meaningless string placeholder. [...] I mostly skimmed the inane discussion,

You shouldn't have skipped the part where they talked about how the fix was not just that. (Though I don't think the actual fix merited the amount of bikeshedding it got either.)

I clicked on the link thinking it would be someone being offended over nothing as tends to be my stance. But no, that is too far. I wonder what the culture is like such that anyone thought committing that, with your name on the commit, was a good idea.

And then the replies defending the idea of not changing it.

I am at a loss.

The day I lost respect for Lennart Poettering, was when a user reported a bug[0] that starting pulseaudio (which he authored) gave a vulgar error message and his response was simply "Sorry, but please don't waste my time, will you?"[1].

It wasn't as if the user was doing anything exotic, just opening it:

  $ pulseaudio
  W: main.c: D-Bus name org.pulseaudio.Server already taken. Weird shit!

In the end Ubuntu carried a patch specifically to remove it. I thought it was a real shame he thought that it was both appropriate to do in the first place, and acceptable to be that dismissive to a polite bug report.

Doesn't surprise me he later won a Pwnie award[2] for his bad handling of bugs, specifically security. I'd recommend giving them a read!

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/44...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20101129202632/http://pulseaudio...

[2] https://pwnies.com/archive/2017/winners/#lamestvendor

While I'm not familiar with any of the people involved, it's very puzzling to me to see some people actively oppose removing such blatant personal insults. Surely changing one string in a package shouldn't be a challenge to Debian maintainers?

I would have changed it. That said, I get where (presumably) the reluctance to change it comes from. It means diverging from upstream and introducing patches. When upstream changes, your patches fail, the package breaks. It's introducing frailty for non-technical correctness, which is a bit harder to justify for many engineers I know than frailty for technical correctness.

See also: Gentoo bug #124595 '"quodlibet" package is useless'

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124595

I don't think that one is particularly relevant. The quodlibet author is right to complain there.

Distro users should be reporting bugs in the distro bug tracker, and the distro package maintainer should be the one to surface these to the author, or in that specific case, let it rot because there's no maintainer.

It's completely relevant. The original Debian issue was the same general thing, with the distro packaging QL alongside an incompatible gstreamer leading to bug reports for the dev: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=421167#15

Is there some especially compelling reason to dredge up a decade-old petty flamewar? Does anyone believe doing so would produce some interesting discourse or enlightenment?

Culturally this is very interesting to me. So here is one vote that is glad it showed up again.

This is (2008).

The best part of this thread (from a yak shaving nerd perspective) is joeyh's breakdown of profanity filtered for personal insult in the Debian changelog: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454#101

"""

Now that this bug has been brought to my attention, I cannot help myself. I have to grep Debian changelogs for profanity, filter for profanity that includes personal insults, and wonder why these packages reached the archive w/o RC bug reports being filed:

"""

I still don't understand where the personal insults are.

"The fucked up system release": no personal insult

"Changed debian/watch to match with the new fucking Sourceforge Interface. Sourceforge sucks!": no personal insult

and so on.

The only ones are possibly "thanks Gerfried Fucks" and "The upstream author is kind of a lazy bastard".

Still, what is that exercise supposed to mean for that bug?

> + file:///Sebastian/Droge/please/choke/on/a/bucket/of/cocks", "")

I’m pretty sure that if someone did that to any of several people I know, they’d find out that not all nerds are soft.

That's obvious,I was talking about Joey Hess and his "there are so many personal insults in other packages, we can't do anything about it" examples.

This really shines a bad light on some of these Debian maintainers. Everyone spending all that time arguing about that in dozens of posts instead of just fixing it and moving on.

Heh that’s pretty funny.

2008!

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