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Alternative (the suckless way): don't require people to keep stupid 'configuration files', help them edit your program to suit their particular needs.

jraph 3y ago
That's completely in the opposite direction of the post. The post argues against forcing users to maintain a fork of the configuration files. You are arguing to help users maintain their own forks of the entire program, basically. While I'm interested in being able to fork the programs I use, and most likely upstreaming the changes, I'm not interested in having to do so to configure them. Configuration files are not stupid and are there for a reason.
- klez 3y ago
  I'm assuming you're unfamiliar with suckless[0], which GP wasn't using as an adjective, but as the name of a project. There's a philosophy behind that decision, which you (and, in part, I) can disagree with. But they do have their reasons to prefer avoiding configuration files. [0] http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/
  - jraph 3y ago
    I am familiar with suckless, but that's useful to mention it explicitly for those here who aren't. Of course I childishly played with the name (but that's their fault picking this name :-)). And of course one can disagree. I like their goal of minimalism and simplicity. I disagree that developer's simplicity should be at the expense of the user's convenience. Computers are already incredibly complex things, and are here to automate things and ease our lives as users. Hopefully a program is written once and used many times, so usage should be optimized, even if it makes the developer's lives a bit harder (I would say interesting :-)). Making software lean and lightweight is part of it (and that's where I agree with suckless), we owe this to our users instead of forcing them to experience slowness and to upgrade their hardware often. Of course that's my view. (I'm a dev)
Barrin92 3y ago
That's not an alternative way, that's literally what the post is critiquing. There's nothing stupid about configuration files, on the contrary, it's completely nonsensical and conceptually wrong to have enduser runtime configuration written into compile time source code. It also entirely defeats the ostensible purpose of making "non-bloated" software because it doesn't get much more bloated than having to recompile an entire program every time you want to make a trivial change that could just be read from a file. You've now made having the entire compiler toolchain installed a requirement if someone wants to change a font. It's the equivalent of burning your house down and building a new one because you want to change a poster on the wall. Suckless software is just an exercise in contrarianism.
- jraph 3y ago
  yep, there's nothing suckless in this, or it's suckless for the devs but not for the users. But even for the devs it kinda sucks in the end.
lordgrenville 3y ago
When I read the headline, I thought this was going to be specifically attacking suckless.
farmdve 3y ago
I thought most software authors have this particular stance, which of course they are in their right to have, that they are offering free software and thus have no obligation to help anyone with anything, and they can always do it by themselves. In the past I've seen links here on HN where certain OSS authors were pressured into helping, fixing, adding features by users who 'demanded' it and the authors were feeling very bad about all this. It wasn't just one post.

jraph 3y ago

That's completely in the opposite direction of the post. The post argues against forcing users to maintain a fork of the configuration files. You are arguing to help users maintain their own forks of the entire program, basically. While I'm interested in being able to fork the programs I use, and most likely upstreaming the changes, I'm not interested in having to do so to configure them. Configuration files are not stupid and are there for a reason.

klez 3y ago
I'm assuming you're unfamiliar with suckless[0], which GP wasn't using as an adjective, but as the name of a project. There's a philosophy behind that decision, which you (and, in part, I) can disagree with. But they do have their reasons to prefer avoiding configuration files. [0] http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/
- jraph 3y ago
  I am familiar with suckless, but that's useful to mention it explicitly for those here who aren't. Of course I childishly played with the name (but that's their fault picking this name :-)). And of course one can disagree. I like their goal of minimalism and simplicity. I disagree that developer's simplicity should be at the expense of the user's convenience. Computers are already incredibly complex things, and are here to automate things and ease our lives as users. Hopefully a program is written once and used many times, so usage should be optimized, even if it makes the developer's lives a bit harder (I would say interesting :-)). Making software lean and lightweight is part of it (and that's where I agree with suckless), we owe this to our users instead of forcing them to experience slowness and to upgrade their hardware often. Of course that's my view. (I'm a dev)

Barrin92 3y ago

That's not an alternative way, that's literally what the post is critiquing. There's nothing stupid about configuration files, on the contrary, it's completely nonsensical and conceptually wrong to have enduser runtime configuration written into compile time source code. It also entirely defeats the ostensible purpose of making "non-bloated" software because it doesn't get much more bloated than having to recompile an entire program every time you want to make a trivial change that could just be read from a file. You've now made having the entire compiler toolchain installed a requirement if someone wants to change a font. It's the equivalent of burning your house down and building a new one because you want to change a poster on the wall. Suckless software is just an exercise in contrarianism.

jraph 3y ago
yep, there's nothing suckless in this, or it's suckless for the devs but not for the users. But even for the devs it kinda sucks in the end.

lordgrenville 3y ago

When I read the headline, I thought this was going to be specifically attacking suckless.

farmdve 3y ago

I thought most software authors have this particular stance, which of course they are in their right to have, that they are offering free software and thus have no obligation to help anyone with anything, and they can always do it by themselves. In the past I've seen links here on HN where certain OSS authors were pressured into helping, fixing, adding features by users who 'demanded' it and the authors were feeling very bad about all this. It wasn't just one post.