3 ms·

Alright. I didn't realise that I was talking directly to one of the designers of dbus, which makes some of the things I said unnecessarily harsh and perhaps eve

by krig 12y ago

Alright. I didn't realise that I was talking directly to one of the designers of dbus, which makes some of the things I said unnecessarily harsh and perhaps even personal. Apologies for that. I have to ask, though - why engage in a thread like this? Clearly, dbus is successful, it is being integrated into the kernel, it is used all over Linux user space by now and whatever flaws it has are clearly not impeding its use. So why bother arguing about the spec on HN? I could sit down and discuss what an improved protocol might look like, but I don't even know if I agree that /any/ protocol that does what dbus does is the right approach, and either way, this is not the place to do so.

hp 12y ago
Why engage is a good question :-) I had the misfortune to see a link on Twitter and discover people were wrong on the Internet. I do think there's useful stuff to learn and discuss here about software development and dbus itself if people dig in and understand it. Perhaps some bystanders will learn something. I welcome improving and even disrupting and replacing dbus but I don't think the kind of criticism found in this article will lead to that.
- Demiurge 12y ago
  I did learn a lot, thanks for commenting. It also seems like you agree with the premise of the article that there is confusing stuff in, what you called 'informal' spec, but explained why. So, thanks again.
gillianseed 12y ago
>I have to ask, though - why engage in a thread like this? Does he need an excuse for wanting to correct misinformation ?
- krig 12y ago
  No, I am just curious. It seems overly defensive. In game development, there was/is a guy named Derek Smart who is famous for popping up in every thread on the internet about one of his games and defending it relentlessly. The result is that every thread on the internet about one of his games devolves into endless flamewars. There are multiple examples of authors writing long responses to every single review of their books on amazon, resulting in a sort of game of insults between author and reviewers. As the designer of something, you are too invested in it to handle someone going "this sucks!" well. My advice would be to sit back, recognize that the other person saying this is not invested to the same degree, is looking at the problem from the completely opposite perspective and is not familiar with the reasons behind every single compromise made, or why a certain feature seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out not to work in practice. Let someone else handle the defense. It doesn't matter if there are valid criticisms to be made - inevitably, everyone describing the specification who weren't involved in writing it will misunderstand something, or leave something out, or quote something out of context or incompletely, or have completely different concerns in mind than the authors did - and as that author you are drawn to such things like a moth to the flame. But you have to resist the flame. After all, you wrote it, it does what you intended, you released it. If someone else wants something different, let them be unhappy and maybe if they are unhappy enough they will come up with their own thing.
  - gillianseed 12y ago
    >It seems overly defensive. Based upon this one instance where he shows up and correct misgivings ? Seriously ? If anything you come across annoyed that your uninformed ranting was corrected.
  - audidude 12y ago
    I didn't find any of hp's comments defensive in the slightest.
  - rsanders 12y ago
    Every one of hp's posts in this thread have been informative. Many of them were written as responses to cries arising from the mob with pitchforks and torches, but that doesn't reduce their utility. Given that both the original article, and your comment, made much of the "ASCII binary protocol", explaining the apparent contradiction certainly raised the signal to noise ratio here.
    - krig 12y ago
      Well, I don't disagree with any of that. I wrote my comments in a bad mood and they came out harsher than I wish they had. I'm just thinking that if I was the author of dbus, I wouldn't engage the noise on HN. It was an honest question and I got an honest reply, and that's great. Hey, all I did in my comment was to quote from the spec. My complaint (well, one of them) is that it's a "binary" protocol but it requires parsing just like an ascii protocol, it encodes data as ascii values and it even embeds a full ascii protocol in the auth sequence. (not to mention XML for reflection with an embedded type DSL in attributes, ...)

by krig 12y ago

hp 12y ago

Why engage is a good question :-) I had the misfortune to see a link on Twitter and discover people were wrong on the Internet. I do think there's useful stuff to learn and discuss here about software development and dbus itself if people dig in and understand it. Perhaps some bystanders will learn something. I welcome improving and even disrupting and replacing dbus but I don't think the kind of criticism found in this article will lead to that.

Demiurge 12y ago
I did learn a lot, thanks for commenting. It also seems like you agree with the premise of the article that there is confusing stuff in, what you called 'informal' spec, but explained why. So, thanks again.

gillianseed 12y ago

>I have to ask, though - why engage in a thread like this? Does he need an excuse for wanting to correct misinformation ?

krig 12y ago
No, I am just curious. It seems overly defensive. In game development, there was/is a guy named Derek Smart who is famous for popping up in every thread on the internet about one of his games and defending it relentlessly. The result is that every thread on the internet about one of his games devolves into endless flamewars. There are multiple examples of authors writing long responses to every single review of their books on amazon, resulting in a sort of game of insults between author and reviewers. As the designer of something, you are too invested in it to handle someone going "this sucks!" well. My advice would be to sit back, recognize that the other person saying this is not invested to the same degree, is looking at the problem from the completely opposite perspective and is not familiar with the reasons behind every single compromise made, or why a certain feature seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out not to work in practice. Let someone else handle the defense. It doesn't matter if there are valid criticisms to be made - inevitably, everyone describing the specification who weren't involved in writing it will misunderstand something, or leave something out, or quote something out of context or incompletely, or have completely different concerns in mind than the authors did - and as that author you are drawn to such things like a moth to the flame. But you have to resist the flame. After all, you wrote it, it does what you intended, you released it. If someone else wants something different, let them be unhappy and maybe if they are unhappy enough they will come up with their own thing.
- gillianseed 12y ago
  >It seems overly defensive. Based upon this one instance where he shows up and correct misgivings ? Seriously ? If anything you come across annoyed that your uninformed ranting was corrected.
- audidude 12y ago
  I didn't find any of hp's comments defensive in the slightest.
- rsanders 12y ago
  Every one of hp's posts in this thread have been informative. Many of them were written as responses to cries arising from the mob with pitchforks and torches, but that doesn't reduce their utility. Given that both the original article, and your comment, made much of the "ASCII binary protocol", explaining the apparent contradiction certainly raised the signal to noise ratio here.
  - krig 12y ago
    Well, I don't disagree with any of that. I wrote my comments in a bad mood and they came out harsher than I wish they had. I'm just thinking that if I was the author of dbus, I wouldn't engage the noise on HN. It was an honest question and I got an honest reply, and that's great. Hey, all I did in my comment was to quote from the spec. My complaint (well, one of them) is that it's a "binary" protocol but it requires parsing just like an ascii protocol, it encodes data as ascii values and it even embeds a full ascii protocol in the auth sequence. (not to mention XML for reflection with an embedded type DSL in attributes, ...)