Quotes of the week

In hindsight however, I think the complexity of Swig has exceeded anyone's ability to fully understand it (including my own). For example, to even make sense of what's happening, you have to have a pretty solid grasp of the C/C++ type system (easier said than done). Couple that with all sorts of crazy pattern matching, low-level code fragments, and a ton of macro definitions, your head will literally explode if you try to figure out what's happening. So far as I know, recent versions of Swig have even combined all of this type-pattern matching with regular expressions. I can't even fathom it.

But if you want to be taken seriously as a researcher, you should publish your code! Without publication of your *code* research in your area cannot be reproduced by others, so it is not science.

It's downright absurd for there to be a known and understood crasher bug, affecting all users, in such a critical component for so long without any acknowledgment or response by upstream or the Fedora maintainers. This and the Flash audio corruption mess make it fairly clear that glibc maintenance is not what it should be for such a crucial package. Given that, the only sensible approach seems to be to go ahead and Just Fix It.