4 ms·

Sigh. New famous bug, and again it’s everyone’s obligation to open the code and express their tsk-tsk, how bad, how bad.

• mistaken 12y ago
  I had hoped that at least there was some new vulnerability discovered in the code, but he is just bashing about coding style. While it's true that the code could be rewritten to be more readable, nobody is willing to invest that amount of work. The whole issue is blown out of proportion because people use bash in an unsafe manner.
  • chris_wot 12y ago
    Whilst I feel that making personal attacks on the writer are no good at all, it does look like bash isn't using modern C, and is using nifty shorthands that doesn't make the code particularly clear. GNU wants freedom for people to distribute code. But do they want us to have the freedom to understand their code? :-)
    • ams6110 12y ago
      Yeah the code could be more readable, by today's standards. OTOH it's using style and idioms that were common practice when it was written. Technical debt is something you accrue when you deliberately violate a current best practice for gains elsewhere (usually meeting a deadline). It's not generally used to refer to code that's simply old. Anyone 20 years from now looking at a snip of code you write today is going to have similar complaints.
    • jimktrains2 12y ago
      I'm sure they would accept clean-up patches.
      • DSMan195276 12y ago
        I think it would depend what you're doing though. Some of these aren't really a big deal, but they'd create tons of code churn if you went and changed them. They probably don't have enough people to review that many code changes for not a lot of gain. I don't know anything about the maintainers though, so I'm just assuming.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• clarry 12y ago
  Hey, at least people are looking now. Of course these condescending blog posts serve little purpose, but the author could've noticed something more important in the process of writing it. Imagine if heartbleed happened and everyone just moved on because bugs happen, deal with it.
• forgottenpass 12y ago
  The best part is when he concludes by passing the buck to "somebody" to fix it.
  • taylodl 12y ago
    That ending really galled me as well and I immediately thought of this old yarn: There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done