4 ms·
If anyone ever says that software engineering is completely unlike plumbing, I will point them towards your comment. All systems, however nicely architected, ar
by akie 5y ago
If anyone ever says that software engineering is completely unlike plumbing, I will point them towards your comment. All systems, however nicely architected, are full of duct-tape solutions like this.
- Grollicus 5y agoAre they though? What I can think of (broken upstream reverse proxies that do mime type inference by filename) would warrant a WE_USE_BROKEN_LEGACY_SHIT_UPSTREAM config flag so that it doesn't get in the way of normal users. So I'm probably missing something and I'm really curious for the underlying vulnerability.
- akie 5y agoI have no clue about the underlying issue, but I'm guessing it's occurring on a boundary or an interplay between two systems. Something like "the username can be part of the URL, and if the URL contains .mov, some browsers will misinterpret this and assume it's a movie file, leading to bad things™". Or: "the username is sometimes used as a folder name, and our syncing software contains rules to exclude certain file extensions, so these folders were never synced, which lead to issues on production servers" I'm guessing it's something along these lines. Something that you control, but not really, leading to these kind of haphazard workarounds.
- andix 5y agoProfessional plumbers don't use duct tape for fixing leaks ;)
- capableweb 5y agoAs someone who has traveled to some of the lesser traveled places on this planet, they do too! Sometimes even worse techniques are being used to fix things.