|
|
Subscribe / Log in / New account

Quote of the week

Free software guarantees you access to the source code, but I have been wondering how many actually read the source code.

To test this I put in a comment telling people to email me when they read this. The comment was put in a section of the code that no one would look to fix or improve the software -- so, the source code equivalent to a dusty corner. To make sure the comment would not show up if some one just grepped through the source code I rot13'ed the source code.

Two-and-a-half months later I received an email from someone who not only managed to find the comment, but also managed to guess the code had to be rot13'ed.

The first cookie was released on January 24, 2011 and was won by AEvar Arnfjord Bjarmason on April 10, 2011.

I inserted a new cookie on August 18, 2013, that was a bit harder as you would have to use rot14. On July 19, 2015 Mark Maimone won that cookie.

This brings me to the conclusion that there are people who are not affiliated with the project who will read the source code -- though it may not happen very often.

Ole Tange presents the results of some covert, real-world research.



to post comments

Hands up

Posted Aug 6, 2015 5:00 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I do this for projects I care about. I'll pull and peruse the commit logs of mpv and tmux occasionally while code is compiling or I think I haven't done so in a while (also helps that they're two of the cleanest C codebases I've come across). There have been numerous bugs I've fixed in mpv due to reading the logs:

- Made this after noticing a 0/1 mixup for stdin/stdout for isatty(): https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/1043
- https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/1200
- https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/1268
- https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/1624
- After seeing complaints about the 7-parameter function (my doing as the parameters accumulated over a branch) in a commit message: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/1520/files
- https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/1339

as well as some comments directly on commits.

Patches for tmux are usually updates to the tmux.vim file when new options or commands are added. I also keep track of various upstreams pretty closely (xmonad and taskwarrior come to mind), but the former is easier to track from the ML and the latter mostly for updates for what's coming down the pipe.

Quote of the week

Posted Aug 20, 2015 16:50 UTC (Thu) by phred14 (guest, #60633) [Link]

Shades of brown M&Ms.


Copyright © 2015, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds