Distributions quote of the week

First, I know that pretty much everyone is (understandably) freaking out about stuff that is getting worse, but I just wanted to share some good news in the form of an old-fashioned open-source success story. I'm a fairly boring person and developed most of my software habits in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so it's pretty rare that I actually hit a bug.

But so far this blog has hit two: one browser compatibility issue and this one. The script for rebuilding when a file changes depends on the inotifywait utility, and it turned out that until recently it breaks when you ask it to watch more than 1024 files.

1. I filed a bug
2. A helpful developer, Jan Kratochvil, wrote a fix and put in a pull request.
3. A bot made test packages and commented with instructions for me on how to test the fix.
4. I commented that the new version works for me
5. The fix just went into Fedora. Pretty damn slick.

This is a great improvement over how this kind of thing used to work. I hardly had to do anything. These kids today don't know how good they have it.

— Don Marti

This thread about line wrapping also shows that there are many with two or more decades of experience in Debian, who have over the years formed their own highly optimized workflows and email client and text editor settings which diverge from what "mainstream" today considers easy or optimal. I am hugely grateful for people who have contributed to Debian for decades and I hope to see them continue to contribute for decades to come. At the same time I wonder how we can narrow the evident cultural gap between the Mutt user generation and newer web email generation users, which also manifests in other areas of workflow preferences as we have seen in discussions about email vs web interface for bug reports.

— Otto Kekäläinen