https://sourceware.org/legacy-ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053...
So it wasn't for lack of trying. Yes, Open Source can't coordinate and this is why we can't have nice things.
He is clearly not being rational there, but I could see how his aesthetic tastes might correlate pretty well with robust software. I suppose that saying no to new features is a good default heuristic, these additions could have easily added more problems than they solve, and then you have more surface area to maintain.
That being said, this old-school ideology of maintainers dumping the full responsibility on the user for applying the API "properly" is rather unreasonable. It often sounds like they enjoy having all these footguns they refuse to fix, so they can feel superior and differentiate their club of greybeards who have memorised all the esoteric pitfalls, simply because they were along for the journey, from the masses.
There's also an element of "Linus Torvalds is an antisocial jerk, and he's a genius, therefore if I am an antisocial jerk I must be doing genius-level work." In particular, it's a lot easier to attack someone with empty insults than it is to defend your own position with substantive thought.
There's way too much of this in general. People use a talented individual with problematic behaviors to justify their own problematic behaviors. So many talented ICs that are absolute dickheads to work with.
Gordon Ramsay - "this food is fucking raw!" /throws food
We have sitcom dramas like House glorifying the same thing.
an antisocial ramsay would just throw your stuff no matter what even you did well, for the sake of messing with your head
>an antisocial ramsay would just throw your stuff
A social Ramsy would refuse to eat your food, but not throw it at you or have a giant baby fit about it. Of course no one would watch him on TV if he was calm and collected.
This is the kind of stuff that can make people seriously ill and kills multiple people every year. This isn’t even lack of skill, it’s pure laziness.
"I want to trust your judgement, so I can delegate decision making to you" has always been his poorly-delivered message.
My point being, not that the person isn’t a jerk or that the decision wasn’t wrong, but that one error by one jerk doesn’t tell us much.
Because there is no easy way to determine if they actually blocked hundreds of bad ideas.
I think being qualified as a jerk or not is orthogonal to the need of gatekeeping (required in my opinion) or the quantities (higher for more popular).
Perhaps you're not seeing because those never existed? I mean, even though you're clearly speaking in hypotheticals, you're fabricating an outlandish scenario where somehow you associate being a jerk with a 100s-to-1 success rate. But there is nothing to support or even suggest that's even remotely real, plausible, or even conceivable. You have only concrete evidence of someone rejecting a sound recommendation on the grounds of gatekeeping mixed with NIH. Gatekeeping and NIH are not quality gates, are they? If that is the process, obviously you cannot expect a positive outcome.
As opposed to what? Unbiased and dispassionate? There's no such thing. What you're probably thinking of is careerist and authoritarian within a corporation. It's not more efficient than the darwinism of open source.
Naturally, passionate builders and experts who rise to prominence controlling a tool will feel strongly about the vision for that tool. That's how it gets made in the first place.
Calling them "emotional" is just cheap.
Your so called "rationality" is easy when you're not the one pouring your intense effort into something.
You keep diminishing and attacking these "arrogant" creators while you're clearly the model of rationality who habe built... No, you use what they build. Funny that.
Maybe take a humble pill.
This is no utopia, and it is not rare, it's pretty basic professionalism and engineering discipline. If you really care about the problem you are solving, you'll push the rest of the baggage aside, especially your ego.
Surely name-calling and making unfounded gut judgements based on us-vs-them tribalism, like is seen in that response, is not very productive. He demonstrated no intention to solve the problem, no acknowledgements that it exists, no explanation why the solution is not appropriate, what alternative solutions might be better... He had no interest in working together to find the best path forward. He was simply being territorial and scaring off those that did not align with his Holy Taste, whatever that is.
You're like companies claiming that "we make decisions based on data".
Believe your own Kool aid but reality is much more nuanced and power/leadership/intuition based than "data based".
I don't want to get into politics but it would be extremely easy for me to find several examples where you'll claim something and when I say that's emotional and tribal you'll decide I must be <label>.
I don't even care about this specific example but about your initial generalization from it. Either you talk about this specific case only or you make and prove your generalizations in a "rational and unemotional" way, right?
Often the reason for these pitfalls is that they exist because they enable some performance optimizations. The respective maintainer does care about performance.
Intel, AMD and Apple would very likely be willing to invest an insane amount of money for a 10 % performance increase. So, if this indeed increases the performance by about 10 %, I'd call it a very good idea.
I'd wager the other 90% are OSS maintainers being jerks. Occam's Razor and all that.
If the core developers/maintainers are putting in thousands of hours over several years, and a patch comes along, it is rightfully at the discretion of those doing 80-95% of the work.
But as negotiating rationally discusses, we value our work more than others—and there’s some emotional attachment. We need to learn to let that go and try to find the best solution, and be open to the bigger picture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Negotiating-Rationall...
People developing proprietary software will not be any less emotional or any more rational. The difference is that it does not happen publicly.
He was not that wrong!
A better example would be signed integer overflow, which a conspiracy of spec authors who don't work in the real world and compiler maintainers with a perverse sense of humor have decided means "Anything goes."
if (strlcpy(dst, src, dst_len) >= dst_len) {
// Truncation!
}BSD got them in 1998, it took 17 years for it to go to posix and another 8 years before they made their way to glibc. 25 years to add a clear improvement
But that is not at all how Posix operates or has operated. Posix standardises common denominators between existing implementations. The fact that we now have strlcpy(3) and strlcat(3) in Posix 2024, is not because Posix designed and stipulated them. Rather, they appeared in OpenBSD in 1998, were found useful by other *nix-es over time, spread, and were finally taken aboard by Posix that standardised what was already out there and being used! This to me is the very opposite of the point the author is trying to make!