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It seems Mark Pizzolato was at the time the primary maintainer and recent contributor (by a large margin) (https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1501 https://groups.

It seems Mark Pizzolato was at the time the primary maintainer and recent contributor (by a large margin) (https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1501 https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1501). Mark made a change to how the virtual disk system worked that broke an esoteric use case (using dd to image multiple disk images to an SD, without an actual file system). The user didn't want to use a workaround (specifying the transfer size in the dd command), and proceeded to use twitter to get people to harass Mark. (https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/toxicity-in-software-related-discussions.html https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/toxicity...) Mark got sick of the harrasment and decided to take his toys and go home. Toxic user prompts toxic reaction by developer.

userbinator 3y ago
I'm sure glad I don't work with developers like that, because that complaint makes perfectly reasonable sense to me and I certainly wouldn't consider it "toxic". Expecting a raw disk image file to be the exact size of the virtual device is not at all an "esoteric use case". Being a prolific contributor doesn't mean you get to force your mistakes on others and cry about it when your decisions come back to bite you. See what Big Tech is doing to us for a great example of what this "feelings-driven design" crap has given us. Words to live by: "if everyone tells you that you're wrong... maybe you are."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- EgoIncarnate 3y ago
  It sounds like there was a config option available to disable the signature addition to the image file ( https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-1086899270 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108689... ). I could see a benefits for having an embedded image signature for preservation and corruption detection issues. I don't think complaining about the design is toxic, but recruiting uninvolved people on twitter, and harassing out of band certainly is. Also reading the bug thread it seems the person with the issue wasn't the same as the one who instigated the harassment. (https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-1086752061 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108675...)
  - anthk 3y ago
    Enabling it by default could break lots of valuable data over the history of computing. That's why I prefer simh-classic.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      Not really; the signature is appended to the tail and can be safely ignored by things that don't know about it. This is a pretty thoughtful way to make the change. It only really matters if you are doing something weird -- e.g. concatenating a lot of images together. Having metadata instead of raw images is useful. The thing was turned on for a couple years before anyone complained IIRC: and then suddenly it was a high-stakes issue with brigading, etc.
      - anthk 3y ago
        NEVER, EVER mangle your raw images, specially if you want to dd/tar them back to the original machine. Also, as a golden rule on IT, specially on emulation, NEVER do unexpected changes to the original media, be disk images, CD-roms, BIOS dumps or any other firmware. If you want to make changes for interop, do it in RAM as a volatile change or write the metadata anything else on the emulator config directory. The mentiones change is not useful, it really sucks. The move was one of the words turds ever done to historical computing and data preservation. Period. The purpose of emulation is to run and preserve the original systems -unchanged- by design. The user is the one who commits the changes while he is running the emulated system from the inside, and not the emulator. The goal is to preserve the data back and forth, not to ruin it.
        mlyle 3y ago
        > mangle your raw images, specially if you want to dd/tar them back to the original machine dd back to the original media is no problem with stuff post-pended; dd will complain that there's an extra block at the end, but other than that, all's good. > The goal is to preserve the data back and forth, not to ruin it. A big part of the point of this change is to prevent you from attaching devices "wrong" in ways that are likely to cause the emulated environment to corrupt them. You can't do that in RAM, and it's better if it is in the same file.
dark-star 3y ago
That "esoteric usecase" was one reason people opposed that change. There are other concerns as well (you can find them if you read the discussion in the GitHub issue linked elsewhere in the comments). For example, it made SimH alter disk images by itself, without warning, even if you only wanted to use them in a read-only manner. There was also concern that sticking metadata right into the data itself was bad from a preservation standpoint. Also there was the point that such things should be opt-in instead of just appearing ferom one version to another, without warning. All of these concerns were dismissed as unimportant or flat out ignored by Mark. Then he went full overboard with his license change (which made a free project non-free) Edit: removed incorrect reference to the GPL
- trn 3y ago
  > you're not allowed to add additional usage restrictions to GPL software SIMH is not GPL'd software.
  - dark-star 3y ago
    yeah, you're right, of course. What I meant is that it made a free license non-free and that got people concerned
    - swagempire 3y ago
      Maybe they shouldn't have harassed him -- sounds like he was doing it on his own time.
      - rnd0 3y ago
        Presumably still is -he continues to be involved in both projects (judging by the commit histories).
johnklos 3y ago
Calling the use case esoteric is flatly wrong. It's literally how many disk images across decades of software work. It's how things like vnd(4) work. Nobody would've cared if it 1) wasn't turned on by default, and 2) didn't destructively change disk images. It's a bit extreme to call people toxic because they got upset that a deliberate change caused data corruption.
- toast0 3y ago
  I don't think getting upset is toxic. But when you don't get the response you want from a small open source project, your next steps shouldn't be to encourage more people to bother the developer(s); that's the toxic behavior IMHO.
  - johnklos 3y ago
    Agree. I see the original post was making a distinction between people who were upset and the person who tried to encourage harassment. That person definitely was being toxic, so please disregard my comment about calling people toxic because I misread and agree with the label
- mlyle 3y ago
  Nobody cared for a couple of years until one person started recruiting lots of people to bug the developer. It doesn't destructively change disk images; it appends something to the end. Other usages of disk images are fine: it's only if you want to use the disk images without a filesystem that you run into trouble. Metadata is useful. Metadata is a whole lot less useful if it's off-by-default.
  - johnklos 3y ago
    This is decidedly not the case, and it attempts to misattribute the issue. I cared because it happened to me. Like most people, I use a package management system (pkgsrc), so I wasn't on the simh mailing list and I didn't know about this change. I update simh via pkgsrc, tried to restart some virtual machines and had fscks corrupt the filesystems of those VMs. I went looking in the mailing lists, saw the discussions, saw how people asked nicely for him to do something more reasonable (the most reasonable would be to not default the feature to on), and saw how he simply doubled down and became dismissive. Note that I don't advocate for harassing people at all. That's a separate issue, and I condemn anyone who'd encourage harassment. "Metadata is a whole lot less useful if it's off-by-default." You're making excuses for him. We shouldn't force something on others because of specious suggestions that it might be useful in the future, particularly when it's actively harmful right now.
parker_mountain 3y ago
> an esoteric use case (using dd to image multiple disk images to an SD, without an actual file system). fwiw this is an _extremely common_ use case. it's literally one of the tasks that dd was created to do

userbinator 3y ago

I'm sure glad I don't work with developers like that, because that complaint makes perfectly reasonable sense to me and I certainly wouldn't consider it "toxic". Expecting a raw disk image file to be the exact size of the virtual device is not at all an "esoteric use case". Being a prolific contributor doesn't mean you get to force your mistakes on others and cry about it when your decisions come back to bite you. See what Big Tech is doing to us for a great example of what this "feelings-driven design" crap has given us. Words to live by: "if everyone tells you that you're wrong... maybe you are."

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
EgoIncarnate 3y ago
It sounds like there was a config option available to disable the signature addition to the image file ( https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-1086899270 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108689... ). I could see a benefits for having an embedded image signature for preservation and corruption detection issues. I don't think complaining about the design is toxic, but recruiting uninvolved people on twitter, and harassing out of band certainly is. Also reading the bug thread it seems the person with the issue wasn't the same as the one who instigated the harassment. (https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-1086752061 https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108675...)
- anthk 3y ago
  Enabling it by default could break lots of valuable data over the history of computing. That's why I prefer simh-classic.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Not really; the signature is appended to the tail and can be safely ignored by things that don't know about it. This is a pretty thoughtful way to make the change. It only really matters if you are doing something weird -- e.g. concatenating a lot of images together. Having metadata instead of raw images is useful. The thing was turned on for a couple years before anyone complained IIRC: and then suddenly it was a high-stakes issue with brigading, etc.
    - anthk 3y ago
      NEVER, EVER mangle your raw images, specially if you want to dd/tar them back to the original machine. Also, as a golden rule on IT, specially on emulation, NEVER do unexpected changes to the original media, be disk images, CD-roms, BIOS dumps or any other firmware. If you want to make changes for interop, do it in RAM as a volatile change or write the metadata anything else on the emulator config directory. The mentiones change is not useful, it really sucks. The move was one of the words turds ever done to historical computing and data preservation. Period. The purpose of emulation is to run and preserve the original systems -unchanged- by design. The user is the one who commits the changes while he is running the emulated system from the inside, and not the emulator. The goal is to preserve the data back and forth, not to ruin it.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        > mangle your raw images, specially if you want to dd/tar them back to the original machine dd back to the original media is no problem with stuff post-pended; dd will complain that there's an extra block at the end, but other than that, all's good. > The goal is to preserve the data back and forth, not to ruin it. A big part of the point of this change is to prevent you from attaching devices "wrong" in ways that are likely to cause the emulated environment to corrupt them. You can't do that in RAM, and it's better if it is in the same file.

dark-star 3y ago

That "esoteric usecase" was one reason people opposed that change. There are other concerns as well (you can find them if you read the discussion in the GitHub issue linked elsewhere in the comments). For example, it made SimH alter disk images by itself, without warning, even if you only wanted to use them in a read-only manner. There was also concern that sticking metadata right into the data itself was bad from a preservation standpoint. Also there was the point that such things should be opt-in instead of just appearing ferom one version to another, without warning. All of these concerns were dismissed as unimportant or flat out ignored by Mark. Then he went full overboard with his license change (which made a free project non-free) Edit: removed incorrect reference to the GPL

trn 3y ago
> you're not allowed to add additional usage restrictions to GPL software SIMH is not GPL'd software.
- dark-star 3y ago
  yeah, you're right, of course. What I meant is that it made a free license non-free and that got people concerned
  - swagempire 3y ago
    Maybe they shouldn't have harassed him -- sounds like he was doing it on his own time.
    - rnd0 3y ago
      Presumably still is -he continues to be involved in both projects (judging by the commit histories).

johnklos 3y ago

Calling the use case esoteric is flatly wrong. It's literally how many disk images across decades of software work. It's how things like vnd(4) work. Nobody would've cared if it 1) wasn't turned on by default, and 2) didn't destructively change disk images. It's a bit extreme to call people toxic because they got upset that a deliberate change caused data corruption.

toast0 3y ago
I don't think getting upset is toxic. But when you don't get the response you want from a small open source project, your next steps shouldn't be to encourage more people to bother the developer(s); that's the toxic behavior IMHO.
- johnklos 3y ago
  Agree. I see the original post was making a distinction between people who were upset and the person who tried to encourage harassment. That person definitely was being toxic, so please disregard my comment about calling people toxic because I misread and agree with the label
mlyle 3y ago
Nobody cared for a couple of years until one person started recruiting lots of people to bug the developer. It doesn't destructively change disk images; it appends something to the end. Other usages of disk images are fine: it's only if you want to use the disk images without a filesystem that you run into trouble. Metadata is useful. Metadata is a whole lot less useful if it's off-by-default.
- johnklos 3y ago
  This is decidedly not the case, and it attempts to misattribute the issue. I cared because it happened to me. Like most people, I use a package management system (pkgsrc), so I wasn't on the simh mailing list and I didn't know about this change. I update simh via pkgsrc, tried to restart some virtual machines and had fscks corrupt the filesystems of those VMs. I went looking in the mailing lists, saw the discussions, saw how people asked nicely for him to do something more reasonable (the most reasonable would be to not default the feature to on), and saw how he simply doubled down and became dismissive. Note that I don't advocate for harassing people at all. That's a separate issue, and I condemn anyone who'd encourage harassment. "Metadata is a whole lot less useful if it's off-by-default." You're making excuses for him. We shouldn't force something on others because of specious suggestions that it might be useful in the future, particularly when it's actively harmful right now.

parker_mountain 3y ago

> an esoteric use case (using dd to image multiple disk images to an SD, without an actual file system). fwiw this is an _extremely common_ use case. it's literally one of the tasks that dd was created to do