Cleaning up software older than me | Hacker News Reader

Cleaning up software older than me

blog.anthrobsd.net

84 pointsfcambus10 comments

The article author carries the same kind of exuberance I saw in people who discovered programming in the 1980s.

I also read his amusing presentation on OpenBSD here. I don't really program in pure C anymore, but I liked learning about strlcat and strlcpy, among other things [1].

It's amazing that a self-described programming newbie gets his changes committed into a high-stakes-security distro like OpenBSD. My conjecture is that this must say something about the OpenBSD developer community culture.

Has anyone reading this commited to both Linux and OpenBSD? It looks to me like the OpenBSD crowd is a lot friendlier, at least judging by some relatively recent comments from Linux developers [2] (funny, but ouch.)

[1] http://www.nycbug.org/event/10343/bcallah-nycbugjan2014.pdf

[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495

Being called out on your stupid choices is a good thing.

Now this is Linus pointing it out so it's going to be rude and funny at the same time.

Does that really make it less friendly of a crowd?

Personally I think not but you might feel like it is if you don't know the people involved that well.

I personally would not feel comfortable in such an environment. It feels hostile and incredibly authoritive. Personally I prefer to work with projects that have a more cooperative management style.

Authoritive? Would it feel different if Linus was just one of the contributors to the kernel instead of the one in charge?

Because I'm quite certain everybody is treated equally and there is no pecking order just a chain of trust.

Plus he is cooperative how do you think the bad code / design made in the kernel in the first place.

It's a chain of trust and he trust the people involved to vet most of the code for him however he has the right to complain if someone messed up.

Now how he does it is uniquely his way and everybody should know that by now but ignoring that i don't see a problem.

Don't waste your breath. The idea that "Linus makes contributors feel unwelcome" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and the people who want it to be true have a stronger social media presence than those who don't.

You can also say that it makes for a good pre-selection process of people who are willing to cope with his attitude. So in that way, your "self-fulfilling prophecy" just means that there is a selection bias in people who are willing to contribute to the linux kernel.

The only pre-selection process happening here is people who take themselves too seriously and get offended easily are less likely to contribute.

If I would have been the guy who wrote that piece of code and read this I would have realized 1. I made a mistake and 2. got roasted by Linus for it in a somewhat funny way.

Wouldn't look much more into it.

Why do we enjoy celebrity roasting shows as comedy but when someone does the same thing on a mailing list everyone gets offended?

It does take a bit of self confidence to take it though which not all of us have but this is a good opportunity to work on it.

Having your stupid choices being pointed out to you is a good thing.

Having this done in an encouraging, positive fashion which will keep you contributing in the future is a good thing.

Having this done in a way which is going to make you feel bad, feel bad about the project, and write off the leadership as a bunch of a-holes is a bad thing, because then you'll stop contributing.

The BSDs are much easier to get code into than Linux in general, it is a smaller community and the processes are generally simpler. FreeBSD now has a review process, but traditionally BSD developers are given discretion, it is a community process not a hierarchy like Linux.

Doubly so for ports. Although they accept code at all levels the core OpenBSD team is much more concerned with the base system than ports and rely more on "everyone else" to keep them up to date.

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