Ben Boyter, an Australian developer, writes about search engines, Go performance, code-counting tools, and open source maintenance.
Commenters praise his storytelling and technical skill, and cite his posts on sloc/cloc performance and GC impact on command line tools.
>warn everyone who uses or is interested in Linux about it
See, I think now you are being too overly dramatic. It's not that bad, I haven't encountered the scrolling bug in a long time. And let's not pretend that Cosmic or KDE or XFCE (or anything else) has no bugs or missing features.
>Feedback to developers is useful, even if it's on a ranty way,
No it really isn't. You can rant to your friends but please don't rant at developers, it's never wanted. Would you like it if someone came into your workplace and ranted at you while you're trying to work?
>It's also easy for the developers and contributors to answer well, or at least give some kind of answer
Not if your first interaction with them is to post a several page long essay full of rants and demands. For any open source project (not just GNOME) I recommend to be nice and talk about one issue at a time. Start with simple and short bug reports or questions. At the end always ask "is there anything I can do to help?" If there is already a bug report then be patient and don't nag them asking when it's going to be done. Do everything you can to make it easy and enjoyable for them to respond to your question. Do not blame anyone for being slow. Doing all these things greatly increases the chances of getting a response. If there is still no response, see this page for what to do: https://boyter.org/posts/the-three-f-s-of-open-source/
>Regarding theming, every big OS has AT LEAST accent color selection
Currently that's…
> How much effort should a library maintainer expend to keep 5.x code in place?
Based on the usage of the version and the support for it in large hosting/infra providers.
> Is it worth it for a library maintainer to remove support for 5.x even if they don't replace it with code that makes use of 7.x functionality?
Breaking backwards compatibility is practically always bad. You do it once. You do it twice. By the third time it does not matter because a large part of your users would have moved on to some other stack by the second time.
> If a site is still running 5.x (stats put it at about 20% of the sites out there are still running these versions https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/5 ), are they going to be updating to the latest versions of libraries?
These must be seen as ecosystems. The ecosystem would slowly move to a higher version over the span of 2-3 years starting from the point when a version starts nearing its EOL. And the users upgrade slowly on their end.
> https://boyter.org/posts/the-three-f-s-of-open-source/
Using the same language in the article: The users would say one single F word to such a project, without the project maintainers ever hearing about it, and silently move on to some project that is not so self-indulgent and so irreverent towards its users. Nobody has the time to jump through hoops to keep their business running on Open SOurce, less suffer such arrogant sh*t.
Such an attidude is only workable if the project is a hobby…
> but I've certainly seen people get upset because they don't understand Mastodon yet
This sentence reminded me of another incident. Ben Boyter launched a service called Mastinator [0], like Mailinator, where you can create disposable fediverse accounts. The fantastic use of this is that you can anonymously follow anyone you want. However, it wasn't taken well by the people. They started sending hateful and abusive messages to Boyter. A popular user tooted [1] something like this, and do check the entire conversation:
> A site called Mastinator (https://mastinator.com) has started aggregating and republishing toots without permission. It creates accounts with your handle and follows you to get your toots (e.g., @aral@mastinator.com, which, just to make clear, is not me).
> @boyter You could, yes. But if you set up an account in my name on your instance, I would call you out for impersonating me and using my name/identity without permission.
They were angry that this service let you access their public posts without permission. It is fediverse! It is supposed to be public and federated! He also started getting hate from other people in the fedi, and many fedi instances started blocking the service. He wrote about his experience with fedi and the aftermath, which is an excellent post educating users about how ActivityPub functions. [2]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34156395
[1] - https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/109585159213960986
[2] -…
How much effort should a library maintainer expend to keep 5.x code in place?
Is it worth it for a library maintainer to remove support for 5.x even if they don't replace it with code that makes use of 7.x functionality?
If a site is still running 5.x (stats put it at about 20% of the sites out there are still running these versions https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/5 ), are they going to be updating to the latest versions of libraries?
Note that the FOSS approach to "but it doesn't support the old version that I'm running" has been "don't upgrade or fork it and maintain it yourself." It's the flip side of https://boyter.org/posts/the-three-f-s-of-open-source/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591265 ).
I'm experiencing this myself with Spring Framework 6 targeting Java 17 as a minimum version even though Java 8 LTS continues through at least 2030.
I think the stuff about nested loops performing poorly is a misunderstanding. There's nothing inherently bad about nested loops. The motivation given in the previous post[0] is:
> The big breakthrough I had was after looking at the hot function I realised that storing the game events in a List of Arrays meant that we had a loop in a loop. It was however possible to flatten this into a single array of integers and reset the game every 11 turns with a simple if check.
The issue here wasn't nested loops, it was data structure overhead and poor data locality from having a lot of tiny lists (11 items each, as I understand it).
0: https://boyter.org/2017/03/golang-solution-faster-equivalent-java-solution/
I just finished reading this [0]. Your story-telling abilities are great. Your technical abilities as well. As a hobbyist search engine "engineer" doing independent research and slowly building on my search engine code base, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I'd also like to mention that I'll be using [0] as a template for how to describe to the public my own process of researching and my though process for picking and choosing a particular piece of tech/data structure/solution.
Just a splendid read.
[0] https://boyter.org/posts/abusing-aws-to-make-a-search-engine/