The humankind must re-think its approach to software development now before it is too late

The quality of software is degrading every day as millions more inept pretend-developers are flooding the IT job market. Attracted by higher salaries and better working conditions than other industries, they forget the most important thing: responsibility for the impact they can make on the job.

Recently I and my just as senior co-worker have been told by our manager that "we test too much". He meant that it takes us longer to go to production than for a novice developer fresh from school in the next cubicle. We exchanged meaningful glances and shrugged: we cannot help it. It is ingrained in us to take responsibility for the results of our work, which entails a lot of testing. The young fellow just codes and releases. Those pesky bugs can be figured out later. And they come in swarms.

Linux never enjoyed mass adoption, but today there is a mass exodus from Linux as repo maintainers happily gulp pre-alpha quality code into production repos. "Unchecked, unchalleged" (c) JRRT these new developers carnage over their dwindling user base: write, release if compiles, enhance their resume, get a job and move on. Who cares that their new code is buggy? Linux rules and that trumps all.

We have been screaming about Gnome 3 fiasco, systemd back-dooring, memory management nightmares, polkitd hijacking CPUs and numerous other issues, but no one is interested in hearing that. Instead it is develop first, never ask questions mode of operation.

Linux memory over-allocation under IO pressure has been a catastrophe since v.2 kernels. We are now on v.5 and it has been at least 15 years. No one bothered to focus on finding a solution and it has been swept under the rug by everyone from Torvalds and Kox to the last monkey-developer at RedHat.

But these unscrupulous developers do not stop at the open-source projects - they spread and crawl into companies who write real-world software: banking, insurance, traffic control, healthcare, manufacturing, power generation - you name it - bringing along their open-source habits of not giving a fuck about quality. We now live in a world, which increasingly depends on decreasingly reliable software.

Many of those open-source developers have been hired by Microsoft, especially under their present thug-leader (or leader-thug) and this immediately manifested itself in the diminishing quality of the OSs: fabulous XP, mediocre 7, cuckoo 8, and, finally, the demented, horrendous 10.

At the same time high-quality OSs have all but kicked the bucket: QNX and OS/2 are history, Solaris turned into a sad caricature on itself, AIX is used by those two companies, can't remember their names. Only iSeries still stands proud among the cesspool of computer filth.

When this pus-filled boil finally burst, you better be prepared! I am. I have stashed copies of old OSs, compilers, and hardware to run them. Good luck to us all!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Developer breaks the OS, refuses to fix - this is how it goes in the wonderful open source world

Some time between Fedora 19 and Fedora 26 the mainatiner of xrdp broke something in his code. One can no longer connect from Windows to Linux via RDP. A minor inconvenience for the developer, but a huge one for those who relied on administering their Linux environments from a Windows host. Does not happen, you say? It does.

What do you do when you come across a Linux bug? If you have been reading my blog, you already know that first you have to track down the proper venue. Some developers are on SourceForge, others are on GitHub, there is a wild bunch who have their own sites, forums or blogs, etc. And finally, there are maillists.

This one did respond to the Fedora's bugzilla ticket quite promptly, to give him a credit. But his response was "Install Gnome and re-test". Well, not helpful, by my standards. If you followed my blog, you would have known, that I do not use Gnome since the v.3 fiasco and have switched to Mate.

The xrdp developer never tested his code with anything other than Gnome: neither KDE, nor Lxde, nor Mate, etc. have been tested. If he only tested, he would have noticed. But he does not care, as he only uses Gnome. And so he pushed an untested piece of code into the main repo of Fedora, breaking it for everyone in the world.

And being a developer, I do not blame another developer for introducing a bug, as to err is human and things happen. I blame the rest of smug, arrogant, condescending "open source community" for accepting a pre-release quality piece of code into the main repo and giving it a blessing to be released without challenging the need for a change and scrutinizing the change.

As I am an active user of Linux and UNIX for the last 20+ years, I am abreast of the development along the years and could not help but notice that over the past 3-4 years the only change from version to version of Fedora is GUI layout. There have been no valuable new functions added to Linux for almost a decade, but re-drawing icons, adding useless animations, removing panel resizing, adding gigantic panels which bear no valuable information but take monitor space is ever accelerating.

I am all for allowing novice developers a chance to prove themselves and enhance their resume, but not at my cost!!! They should not be allowed to destroy things with impunity and contribute nothing of value. When is this madness going to end?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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