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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

The, uh, first PR: https://github.com/Microsoft/msbuild/pull/1

I wish he had a bit more empathy for whatever poor grunt at Microsoft had to slog through the process of open-sourcing it only to get this in thanks

I have incredibly complicated feelings about this whole topic, but I certainly agree with you.

I got loads of time for that, but I've also suffered at the hands of MSBuild as have thousands of others so the PR seemed like a funny troll at the time.

Seriously - I remember at one client there was a specific machine set up to edit the build on because it was the only one that could open the workflow editor without crashing. Why there was a workflow editor to edit MSBuild stuff I don't know but that's that world in a nutshell.

Workflow editor sounds like Team Build, which is not the same thing.

I don't disagree that people have problems with Microsoft products but I would just suggest asking yourself whether the people who went to the trouble of open-sourcing something are likely to want those problems to exist rather than, say, engineers trying to do what they can at a big, complicated company. Is it more likely that the person who reads a troll PR is going to say “I had no idea everyone wasn't happy with this!” or that their boss will say “See, I told you that releasing this was a waste of time”.

IMO the PR is not only disrespectful but also utterly wrong, from a technical point of view.

If Make was that awesome of a project, it would have evolved to cover the needs of most developers, however, some tools grew around it to "workaround" its limitations, and then the monster called autotools was born.

I consider MSBuild much less worse than autotools. I'm not yet a fan of any build tool to recognise that it's good, but at least I can tell that MSBuild is one that sucks the least.

So, a troll/idiot tried to be funny. Let's not reward him with any more attention?

I thought it was funny, why are people so touchy about it?

PR are not the place for jokes. Developers have enough to do managing their projects, they don't need to waste time sorting through jokes.

You might say, "it's just one joke, what's the big deal?" One joke, attracts others. Everyone thinks they're funny and their joke with worth everyone else's time to read it. If PR become a place that's acceptable to make jokes, it'll be flooded with noise.

> PR are not the place for jokes.

There's a well-established tradition of pull requests and issues being used for commentary and humor.

Here's a selection. The first one is by the founder CEO of a company with a ~$1B valuation that's prepping for an IPO and is very similar to the one everyone here is complaining about. The second one has comments from a couple well-known tech folks. And so on...

https://github.com/saberma/shopqi/pull/409

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/pull/1074

https://github.com/ericf/yui3-gallery/pull/21

https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues

https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/2472

But apparently now that Microsoft is using GitHub, everything is Serious Business™? Is there a dress code now, too?

Yeah those were all unhelpful, trash. Our point exactly.

... uh GitHub Pull Requests are not a place for jokes that's why.

I don't get the Clueless animated gif. What does that mean in this context?

The girl represents MS being proud of itself for open sourcing something the two blokes consider irrelevant, as they head to the pub for a nice pint of Make.

That's my interpretation (and not my sentiment - I'd rather MS open-source tools like this than not).

Absolutely nothing, it was as relevant as the pull request itself.

Exactly. Rob was just being an annoying prick.

Jees, what is your issue seriously?

It's all just a bit of fun; there is no need to get directly insulting over it.

You absolutely were being an annoying prick. The best thing you can do is own up to it and apologize. Definitely not what you're doing right now, what with the whole "jees, what is your issue" thing.

The reason he's so touchy about it is he's a narcissistic annoying prick. He only did it for attention since people pay attention to bullies, and it requires no work or intelligence unlike being paid attention to for contributing constructively. Call him out as an obnoxious bully and his ego can't stand it.

This series of comments is absolutely disgusting.

Maybe you overestimate how funny you are.

Most professional developers will view this as a shameful and classless move on your part.

Calling someone a "prick" on multiple websites, as you have done, is massively rude.

The fact that your nasty comment here got upvoted rather than flagged to death is really sad.

Well now, isn't Rob Ashton just one of the wittiest people on the Internet these days!

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