Hacker News Reader

Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

If anyone else is wondering like me who Bruce Evans is:

> Bruce Evans <bde@FreeBSD.org> > Bruce is the Style Police-Meister. When you do a commit that could have been done better, Bruce will be there to tell you. Be thankful that someone is. Bruce is also very knowledgeable on the various standards applicable to FreeBSD.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committ...

View on HN

Seems he had an approach to reviews worthy of emulation:

"Code reviews from Bruce came in three flavours, "mild", "brucified" and "brucifiction", but they were never personal: It was always only about the code, the mistakes, the sloppy thinking, the missing historical context, the ambiguous standards - and the style(9) transgressions."

Source: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contrib...

Bruce's reviews were singularly masterful. He consistently condensed valuable layers of meaning into terse prose in a way that I have never experienced otherwise. As I would uncover these layers during repeated readings, I would develop the unshakable feeling that even as brilliant as Bruce was, he must have put great care and effort into his writing.

Do you know of a good example?

I wouldn't suggest emulating it. His approach to review was to exhaustively detail every perceived bug in any particular file when someone touched that file. Preexisting issues unrelated to the change. Style warts unrelated to the change. Subjective opinions unrelated to the change. In his emails, every one of these was a "bug."

There is some value in suggesting adjacent areas for future work, if authors have time and interest, but BDE went well beyond that.

I think Bruce should be admired for his demonstrated desire to improve FreeBSD, and for his great attention to detail. But I would not like anyone to emulate his code review emails.

If you're reviewing a block of code, you need to review the whole final version (not just the diff) or you risk missing context and interactions. If you're doing that, it's simpler to just review the whole thing and not filter out some parts just because you later notice that it predates the current patch. Although I would tend to hope that he doesn't treat pre-existing issues as blockers, I can certainly see why a person would take that approach if the goal is code quality.

Please do not rush to defend that which you are clearly unfamiliar with.

Touching other lines that are not related to intended changes will only obscure the situation.

He is the author of bcc, as86 and ld86.

Write K&R C and compile to 16-bit for 8086 or 3086.

https://github.com/lkundrak/dev86

In the early days of Linux, bcc was used in building the kernel.

bcc used to be required for ELKS.

bcc is still used today, e.g., in compiling VirtualBox.

http://web.archive.org/web/20200427081559/https://www.virtua...

Didn't know, thanks for the extra info!

Also mentioned here: https://lwn.net/Articles/808733/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com