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Bus factor is irrelevant. It's a concept that basically boils down to "people would not be smart enough to understand the code unaided". This is plainly wrong.
by pierrebai 7y ago
Bus factor is irrelevant.
It's a concept that basically boils down to "people would not be smart enough to understand the code unaided". This is plainly wrong. I speak from experience of diving into some horrible code base.
It also assumes that reproducing the functionality from scratch would be hard. Looking at all the reimplementations of A where A is one of unix, X, web browser, network stack, SQL database and other complex techno, it is also clearly not true.
- japanoise 7y agoDisagree. Learning a codebase from scratch is tricky; it's better if you have someone to teach you. So if the one contributor gets bus'd, then it'll take time (=money) to get up to speed.
- archseer 7y agoMy point here was that it's really easy to complain about the touchpad driver but it takes a lot more effort to actually go and write the code. There was some effort last year: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wbharding/libinput/-/commits/master/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wbharding/libinput/-/commits/... I also don't see bus factor the same way you do. People can be smart enough to understand the code, but unless someone actually goes and actively takes up code maintenance the project will slowly fade and disappear (for example the synaptics driver that libinput replaced https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xf86-input-synaptics/commits/master https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xf86-input-synaptics/com...).