rleigh

63 ms·

301.
by rleigh 6y ago
Mozilla is an interesting case, but I don't think it's representative of the wider ecosystem because it's unique. It's a corporation which isn't selling its products, and it's also a nonprofit which doesn&#x27
302.
by rleigh 6y ago
Running NSS and PAM modules in-process was IMO a historical mistake. Convenient in one aspect, rather inconvenient and impractical in many others. If we were to redo these today, I think we'd do them out-of-process and talk to them ov
303.
by rleigh 6y ago
While the power of PCR isn't in question, I think you're overstating the case at bit. It didn't "nuke" whole areas of Biology, but it did add clarity and it did answer questions which previously were hard or imposs
304.
by rleigh 6y ago
As a PhD biologist I'd love to hear some examples of this. PCR is a great tool, and it's absolutely been a transformative research tool. But it's just one tool out of a catalogue of many others. It can't answer all que
305.
by rleigh 6y ago
I lived in one of the hardest water areas in Britain for a long while. Standard syphon flush mechanism was never a problem. May be worth a try. The newer replacements are vastly less durable.
306.
by rleigh 6y ago
I don't really buy the argument I'm afraid. I've been an Emacs user for over 20 years. I like it, and find it productive. But it's stuck in a rut, in a very similar manner to Perl 5. If that isn't addressed, it w
307.
by rleigh 6y ago
When I was maintaining sysvinit and initscripts, and testing changes to these, as well as initramfs, lvm, and all other associated packages critical to booting, that's exactly what I did. Before upload of every single release, it would
308.
by rleigh 6y ago
I don't believe it is following the high-level direction at all. It's completely counter to it. Dropping existing working support is deliberately and intentionally stopping alternatives from working. Refusing to consider help fr
309.
by rleigh 6y ago
Lets get some perspective here. This change actively and intentionally broke working systems. Let that sink in before considering the severity of the problem and the appropriateness of the actions.
310.
by rleigh 6y ago
> "I guess it's up to the maintainer" When you have a high-level direction set by the organisation, you can't have it arbitrarily overridden by individuals with no discussion and no justification. This permits indivi
311.
by rleigh 6y ago
Look how many C library functions implicitly call strlen() internally. Also, look at functions like sscanf(). It can be orders of magnitude slower than fscanf() because every invocation calls strlen while fscanf incrementally reads from th
312.
by rleigh 6y ago
Many, if not most, small MCUs can also run C++ these days as just as well as C. If you want to write simpler and more robust applications, it's easily achievable.
313.
by rleigh 6y ago
Thanks, that will certainly reduce my frustration a little bit!
314.
by rleigh 6y ago
The processes are a legacy of distributed development in the era of dial-up internet. No always-available services, no github, not even any requirement for version control. With every package being maintained independently. While most pa
315.
by rleigh 6y ago
Tell me about it. Doing bulk updates to dozens of bugs as a routine daily activity was an exercise in masochism. As for making comments on existing bugs, you had to manually download the mbox archive just to make sure the right recipients
316.
by rleigh 6y ago
It's an interesting question. Like bounties, I think it would not work, for similar reasons. Work you contract out is effectively saying: none of you volunteers are up to the task. We'll have to get someone better than you to do
317.
by rleigh 6y ago
It's a orthogonal concern and isn't relevant to the discussion at hand. "Merit" in this context is based upon technical considerations and is unrelated to contributors' personal finances and employment status. Con
318.
by rleigh 6y ago
Err, yes. Yes it is. Debian is an all-volunteer organisation. Those are the terms for participation and they apply equally to all. If you want to be paid for writing free software, then get a job with a company that does that. Debian is
319.
by rleigh 6y ago
I'd like to say yes, but I really don't think that would work. It changes an organisation where everyone contributes for free to one where a subset of the developers are all chasing after bounties. "Equal access" doesn
320.
by rleigh 6y ago
He does certainly have an axe to grind. But that doesn't make most of the points he raises false. Many of his observations are completely correct.
321.
by rleigh 6y ago
It can be done, but culturally the projects are too different. There were valid reasons for the hostility. Bringing money into the equation completely changes the dynamics of an all-volunteer project, and splits the developers into the gil
322.
by rleigh 6y ago
Some of its paradigms are plain stupid. C-Z (in the GUI) triggers minimise of the window. In a shell, that's fine. It suspends the process. In a GUI it is just bloody annoying. There's a perfectly good minimise button if I want
323.
by rleigh 6y ago
Likewise. Not even using RAID 5 or 6, just RAID 1. Completely destroyed all the data on both mirrors. Truly terrible. When the error codepaths are this poorly tested, it does not inspire confidence. I believe the bug which caused this
324.
by rleigh 6y ago
The licensing incompatibility is not arising from the CDDL licence, but the GPL. You can combine the CDDL with pretty much anything. As a result, it would be extraordinarily difficult for Oracle to sue since it would not be the CDDL licenc
325.
by rleigh 6y ago
It doesn't "just work". There are multiple significant design defects which result in absolutely atrocious performance in many common scenarios, or even stop the file system from working. These haven't been addressed.
326.
by rleigh 6y ago
Have you tried XeTeX with the TeX Gyre fonts? It made a big difference for me. (I previously used pslatex and then pdflatex with Palatino/mathpazo as well.)
327.
by rleigh 6y ago
Yes, it definitely has its limitations. It used to store everything on one line without breaks if I recall correctly. With a little bit of work to ensure stability of numbering, FODT and related flat ODF formats could be really usable with
328.
by rleigh 6y ago
It makes sense as a concept. In practice, it may lead to very unfortunate feedback effects if deployed at scale.
329.
by rleigh 6y ago
This "random capriciousness" is perhaps the primary concern which keeps me from developing for Apple systems. If I invest my own time and capital into developing a product, which can only be sold through a single outlet, and which
330.
by rleigh 6y ago
Part of my PhD programme was a "transferrable skills" set of courses which included planning and project management, Gantt charts and all that stuff to enable you to plan several years of work.

More ›