this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 105 points 8 months ago (3 children)

user shouting

user: "YOU MUST IMPLEMENT XYZ!!!! IT'S ESSENTIAL FOR MY USECASE"

answer: "Thanks for your feed back. We accept pull requests. "

and the user was never heard from again.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago

Until later on a random blogpost happens about "why FOSS is dying" or "why FOSS developers are rude" and you get namedropped :D

[–] LordKitsuna 34 points 8 months ago (1 children)

or you can be gnome, and "accept pull requests" by letting them stall for 8 years for no reason, refuse to elaborate, then claim your getting bullied when users get upset. that's a solid third option

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm guessing you're talking about something specific and if so could you link the pull requests or repository?

[–] LordKitsuna 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

There's actually a few of them, but the most recent I can remember off the top of my head is probably the DRM leasing. That was a fun one. Everyone got together discussed how to do DRM leasing, gnome agreed and signed off on the implementation, stayed quiet for a long time, someone made a pull request for the agreed upon implementation, silence for a bit, and then all of a sudden "actually this implementation bad should be portal so nvm not doing it this way everyone else should change to use portals"

ah right another was variable refresh https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154 basically sat for 3 years with no review, and when users started being like hey we really need this what's going on developers got all super defensive and ultimately locked it claiming harassment

The comment about 8 years was a reference to the thumbnails in the file browser. If I recall correctly that one took about 8 years

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I do recall the thread linked and I think a few individuals whose sole purpose on the Gnome GitLab was insulting the Gnome maintainers were banned. Sometimes Gnome's obsession with polish can be a double edged sword. I don't think anyone on the Gnome team let's merge requests die on purpose its just a lack of communication from them. Wish Gnome would take some risks with the DE with new features in the future.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

What do you mean giving back to the community? We already report a use case!!

[–] marcos 89 points 8 months ago

Ignore the shouting; ignore the project; take a vacation and relax.

Id anybody paying you to be a FOSS developer? If no, you can do whatever you want with it.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Wayland development. Tons of folks yelling “X is good enough!” Where they just ignore that no one is actively developing XOrg which is pretty much the biggest X11 implementation.

Plenty maintaining XOrg but new things aren’t coming to XOrg, there’s just no one there the XOrg devs moved to Wayland.

So all these people shouting, they’re telling you keep a piece of software that’s very fragile, in a space that hardware makers are progressing at rapid pace, has decades of hot fixes, duct tape, and cruft, and nobody is actively developing for.

Like I just don’t understand the people yelling that Wayland is raping peoples wives and setting fire to their dogs. The yelling group is screaming for people to use something that nobody wants to work on and nobody is paying enough for people to work on. The code base is horrible and it easily causes burnout in three weeks or less. No one in their right mind is picking it up for shits and giggles.

So if everyone abandons Wayland, what’s the end goal? Keep riding XOrg till hardware outpaces it completely? Like I don’t understand what the Wayland haters are trying to get at. There’s so little going on in XOrg at this point and everyone seems to universally hate the code base. And a rewrite of the base sounds a whole lot like Wayland but artificially adding in X11 restrictions that make no sense since we all aren’t using PDP-11 to run the clients.

I get that Wayland has configurations that don’t work yet. All software has bugs, including X11 implementations. But Wayland is arguably a technology that is more in line with how modern hardware works than the X11 protocol will ever be. And Wayland is designed to be easy for devs to work with, not a cobble of archaic limitations due to a protocol that was designed for 1970s era computers.

That level of hate for Wayland is just this confusing Luddite cry for software that hardware that properly supports it no longer exists. The reason modern video cards do run on X at this point is because of a lot of hacks. I thought everyone understood this when we did the whole AIGLX vs XGL thing.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You're listening to loud asshats and assuming they're the majority. They're not.

One day Wayland will reach a tipping point where it will replace X. Until then, most users will just stick with whatever their distro installs. Most people don't care one way or another.

As for me, I'm probably gonna to stick with X until I have no choice because I actually use the network features that Wayland isn't replacing. That doesn't mean I hate Wayland - I've never used it - it just means it's not the best software for me at this time. Most people never do anything with X that Wayland can't do and won't notice when it becomes the default.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You know you can run XWayland and have clients connect via network?

There's still some development going on in Xorg and it's pretty much all XWayland, it's going to stay alive as a compatibility layer for the forseeable future and beyond. And as a network layer until someone thinks of something better (no, sending video isn't better, the strength of X as a network protocol is that it doesn't need much bandwidth). It's the hardware interface stuff, actually throwing pixels on screen, that's thoroughly dead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's cool and all, but why would I want to? Display systems are invisible when they work right, and X has worked right for me (save for some pre-EDID config issues) since the 90s. I run a program, it pops up on my screen and I interact with it. That's all I ask of it.

None of the issues I've had with X (drivers, mostly) will be resolved with Wayland. For me, it's a solution in search of a problem. The only reason I have even a passing interest is that it's (theoretically) easier to maintain and change as computing changes.

I'll move to Wayland when I have to, but right now there's no reason to not use X.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

None of the issues I’ve had with X (drivers, mostly) will be resolved with Wayland. For me, it’s a solution in search of a problem.

You're welcome to continue to develop and maintain X, wrapping even more duct tape around all that duct tape, noone is stopping you. Or, alternatively, you simply never had a look at the X source code -- I cannot fathom a developer who would be masochistic enough to actually maintain that codebase. It was unsalvageable when the devs started to abandon it for Wayland, fifteen years ago, it's not any more salvageable now.

And if you want to "Fix X" -- that, precisely, is wayland: X is a buggy mess of fundamentally insecure software, developed before "buffer overflow" was a thing people acknowledged as security issue. It's software from the age of strlen. It cannot be fixed while keeping it compatible and if you have used X "since the 90s" you know very well how much of a shitshow it is, and it does not just "pop things up on your screen and lets you interact with them". Random thing: In wayland, programs can't focus fight.

I’ll move to Wayland when I have to, but right now there’s no reason to not use X.

Yes, there is: Making the transition faster. All this griping people are doing right now and during the last what five years could've been avoided if DEs, window managers, toolkits, etc, had actually paid attention to what the X devs were doing. All those screen sharing and global shortcut protocols could have been ready ten years ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Why do I care about the state of the code? It works. Perhaps all these people complaining are really just sick of your proselytization.

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, "You only get one life. You can pick up five causes on any street corner."

[–] LemmysMum 1 points 8 months ago

What are we replacing? You keep referring to a placeholder but I don't know what is supposed to go there.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

its crazy to think that such an old display server is still being used and even defended to this day. X these days feels like a small thing with way too many extensions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It has many neat little features that will never get implemented into Wayland for security reason (e.g. want to play a video on a button in your spreadsheet app using mpv?). It was fun while it lasted, but the next generation will never be able to experience it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

(e.g. want to play a video on a button in your spreadsheet app using mpv?

You can definitely do that as wayland supports sub-compositors. You probably shouldn't, though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How do you that in wayland? I'm very interested with crazy and useless stuff like this. On X11, you can pass a window ID to mpv with --wid, it'll attach the player to that window, even if that window is actually a button in a spreadsheet app.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

You implement the wayland server interface, launch mpv with the right environment to connect to you, then you take the buffer mpv gives you and compose it onto your window.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Like I don’t understand what the Wayland haters are trying to get at

New things bad.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I feel like this is the answer to almost any case where many people hate on something.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

[–] sailingbythelee 47 points 8 months ago

Well, I'm a Windows user who just installed Linux Mint and spent a day setting up the free software media streaming server stack. It was a fun project, and it is impressive how well the many parts work together.

So, I'm just here to say THANK YOU to all of the FOSS developers out there. I am truly amazed at the incredible work you do!

[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (1 children)

FOSS user:

Wants to improve the software and sees easy fixes, but isn't allowed to create a Merge Request because company policy disallows you from writing code for other projects on company time

[–] Lyricism6055 31 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Good luck with them holding that up in court. Just do it on your own hardware and you're good to go

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I don't really code in my free time, every merge request for a FOSS project I wanted to do so far was for company projects where a feature was missing or buggy. My GitHub and Gitlab accounts are full of outdated forks we needed for a minor change in the FOSS project which I was not allowed to merge upstream

[–] MajorHavoc 0 points 8 months ago

I had that situation for several years. I skipped to a pro-opensource organization, and have never looked back. The coolest part is I have commits accepted to some big name projects now, which I figure is part of why nobody asks me to write fizz-buzz in an interview anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Not submitting the pull request until off work hours (maybe a hour or two after the shift whistle blows) would also be a good story to show the court.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I'm about to post out a new FOSS project I've been working on for a while, so this is making me a bit nervous

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Don't overthink it. Just publish. And as for entitled users, remember that you don't owe them. If anyone insists on a feature, tell them that you can prioritize them for the right fee.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Or link the contributing page 😂

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

In reality, those demanding users only start to show up once you have a huge number of users. Post the project and just ignore support requests until you feel like working on it.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

[cries in seeing how people treat ROM maintainers]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Doesn't worth the mental burnout buddy