Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I love Immich & greatly appreciate the amazing work the team put into maintaining it, but between the OP & this "Cursed Knowledge" page, the apparent team culture of shouting from the rooftops complaints that expose their own ignorance about technology is a little concerning to be honest.

I've now read the entire Cursed Knowledge list & - while I found some of them to be invaluable insights & absolutely love the idea of projects maintaining a public list of this nature to educate - there are quite a few red flags in this particular list.

Before mentioning them: some excellent & valuable, genuinely cursed items: Postgres NOTIFY (albeit adapter-specific), npm scripts, bcrypt string lengths & especially the horrifically cursed Cloudflare fetch: all great knowledge. But...

> Secure contexts are cursed

> GPS sharing on mobile is cursed

These are extremely sane security feature. Do we think keeping users secure is cursed? It honestly seems crazy to me for them to have published these items in the list with a straight face.

> PostgreSQL parameters are cursed

Wherein their definition of "cursed" is that PG doesn't support running SQL queries with more than 65535 separate parameters! It seems to me that any sane engineer would expect the limit to be lower than that. The suggestion that making an SQL query with that many parameters is normal seems problematic.

> JavaScript Date objects are cursed

Javascript is zero-indexed by convention. This one's not a huge red flag but it is pretty funny for a programmer to find this problematic.

> Carriage returns in bash scripts are cursed

Non-default local git settings can break your local git repo. This isn't anything to do with bash & everyone knows git has footguns.

> Carriage returns in bash scripts are cursed

Also the full story here seemed to be

1. Person installs git on Windows with autocrlf enabled, automatically converting all LF to CRLF (very cursed in itself in my opinion).

2. Does their thing with git on the Windows' side (clone, checkout, whatever).

3. Then runs the checked out (and now broken due to autocrlf) code on Linux instead of Windows via WSL.

The biggest footgun here is autocrlf but I don't see how this is whole situation is the problem of any Linux tooling.

This is imo ultimately a problem with git.

If git didn't have this setting, then after checking out a bash file with LFs in it, there are many Windows editors that would not be able to edit that file properly. That's a limitation of those editors & nobody should be using those pieces of software to edit bash files. This is a problem that is entirely out of scope for a VCS & not something Git should ever have tried to solve.

In fact, having git solve this disincentives Windows editors from solving it correctly.

> I don't see how this is whole situation is the problem of any Linux tooling

Well, bash could also handle crlf nicely. There's no gain from interpreting cr as a non-space character.

(The same is valid for every language out there and all the spacey things, like zero-width space, non-breaking space, and vertical tabs.)

You will have the same problem if you build a Linux container image using scripts that were checked out on the windows host machine. What's even more devious is that some editors (at least VS Code) will automatically save .sh files with LF line endings on Windows, so the problem doesn't appear for the original author, only someone who clones the repo later. I spent probably half a day troubleshooting this a while back. IMO it's not the fault of any one tool, it's just a thing that most people will never think about until it bites them.

TL;DR - if your repo will contain bash scripts, use .gitattributes to make sure they have LF line endings.

The biggest mistake was running Linux programs over files created by Windows programs. Anything you move between those worlds is suspect.

It wouldn't be a problem if git didn't try to magic away the difference.

The Date complaint is

> JavaScript date objects are 1 indexed for years and days, but 0 indexed for months.

This mix of 0 and 1 indexing in calendar APIs goes back a long way. I first remember it coming from Java but I dimly recall Java was copying a Taligent Calendar API.

You're taking the word cursed way too seriously

This is just a list of things that can catch devs off guard

I guess you're right - I find the tone off but it's not egregious & it is mostly a very useful list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com