Weekly Edition
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Quotes of the week
There's patronage. This is where the Crown
Prince of Bavaria, say, gives Linus Torvalds a castle and a moat, and bids him
to write code for the pleasure of the court, or else be thrown in the dungeon
with those BSD mongrels. Linus goes on to create great works, often prefaced
with a large set of logon messages in praise of his honoured patron, only to
die later in poverty following some dismissive comments he includes in a
kernel driver about the CEO of OSDN's mistresses' pet lioness.
-- Danny
O'Brien (a recycled column but still fun).
Critics of patronage point out to live on the whims of a distant, self-involved elite is a demeaning life for Linux programmers, reminiscent as it is of both medieval surfdom and being a mere Linux user, both of which being horrid epochs that as a civilisation we imagine we have transcended.
In Ubuntu we have in general considered upstream to be "our ROCK",
by which we mean that we want upstream to be happy with the way we
express their ideas and their work. More than happy - we want
upstream to be delighted! We focus most of our effort on
integration. Our competitors turn that into "Canonical doesn't
contribute" but it's more accurate to say we measure our
contribution in the effectiveness with which we get the latest
stable work of upstream, with security maintenance, to the widest
possible audience for testing and love. To my mind, that's a huge
contribution.
-- Mark
Shuttleworth
Grr. I'd love to say "I told you so", and write another rant about
-rc series patches. But I'm too lazy, so people - please mentally
insert my standard rant here.
-- Linus Torvalds
I didn't know that sending a test patch which is admittedly not pretty
is a capital crime nowadays.
-- Thomas GleixnerIn future I'll restrict myself to look at such stuff only on Monday to Friday between 9AM and 5PM and send test/RFC patches only when they got approved by the nonshitapproval committee, which holds a meeting once a month. (Log in to post comments)
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 11, 2008 0:50 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
I sympathise with Mr. Gleixner, but just because it's 11 PM doesn't mean that one is excused from sending out bad patches. Perhaps stopping work earlier, and getting some rest, before tackling the problem the next day would be a better idea? Certainly, better to have a good patch tomorrow than a bad patch now.
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 12, 2008 8:43 UTC (Fri) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link] You should check the context. It was in the midst of long debugging session with Thomas sending multiple debug patches to a tester. Ugly (but functional) patches are perfectly fine in such circumstances and waiting for the next morning would achieve nothing in terms of resolving the bug. (in fact it would be counter-productive) Anyway ... it got all resolved quickly, the bug was fixed and the ugliness was cleaned up as well.
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 12, 2008 16:07 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
Ahh, okay. Well, fair enough; debugging code can be ugly and horrid as long as it gives useful information. :-)
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 15, 2008 20:14 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
In fact I'd argue "uglier is better" in some cases, since it'll force you to revisit the code once the bug is boxed into a corner, and sort it out properly afterwards for the final patch.
If something is only slightly ugly, there's sometimes a temptation to leave it as-is, when it may indeed be a hack that was intended to flush out a bug, not be a proper fix. At least, I've noticed this in my own programs.
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 11, 2008 7:57 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
I commented on Mark Shuttleworth's blog (the first Alex there is me), and while it was great of him to reply, I do worry that their plan isn't going to be met with amazing success.
He's talking about doing heavy lifting in X.org, KDE and GNOME, but still expects that the developers will be forking stuff onto Launchpad and then later contributing the code back.
I appreciate that joining 200 Bugzillas isn't possible. But joining three or four for the key projects you want to do heavy lifting on seems reasonable to me.
I worry that going away, developing something, then sending it back generally doesn't work well. I can think of a number of times Novell has tried this, and I'm not sure it works more times than it fails. The more invasive the change, the more I worry that it won't be accepted.
I guess time will tell.
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 11, 2008 15:04 UTC (Thu) by jbailey (subscriber, #16890) [Link]
I think it will work if a key metric for the employees is "Integrate the
software upstream" - because then that's what they will be paid to do. If being successful at the job isn't tied to this, it will be absolutely discarded in favour of pushing the features into the next release. The primary target has to be seen as upstream, not Ubuntu.
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 11, 2008 17:47 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There is no one specific pattern or rule you can follow which guarantees upstream acceptance; you just have to try your best.
Hopefully this will be something that they will do. I was a little disappointed, for example, to see the Ubuntu Netbook Remix front-end not happen in the GNOME space, even though it's very similar to a number of other apps which people have already written: it would be cool to see the effort to "upstream" stuff extended there, as well.
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 12, 2008 0:15 UTC (Fri) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
Um, did I miss something? I looks like Shuttleworth just announced that they are forking several of the largest software packages (and perhaps every package included in their distribution) by setting up their own SCMs. How is this not big news?
Quotes of the week Posted Sep 12, 2008 2:10 UTC (Fri) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] Man, I didn't realize that European medievals surfed, much less had a whole class dedicated to it. Cool! Of course, the royals didn't, because as we all know: "Charlie don't surf."
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