Hubbard Asks FreeBSD Hackers To Rename EDOOFUS

MobyTurbo writes "Jordan K. Hubbard, on instruction from Apple, had to inform the freebsd-hackers list that the error, pointed to by the error message number named EDOOFUS, must be changed. Several interesting suggestions have been made in the resulting thread."

Comments

A little misleading...

[greck]

From the article, it doesn't seem like Apple actually asked Hubbard to do anything, nor does it seem like he's saying it "must be changed"... he's just proactively trying to solve a problem before it forks into a silly headache. No need to inflate the drama of the situation any more than it's already going to be.

Re:This seems typical

[cperciva]

The assumption that anyone who makes a mistake is a 'doofus' doens't surprise me much at all.

I think people are misunderstanding the purpose of this error. EDOOFUS doesn't mean "someone has made a stupid mistake" -- it means "*I* have made a stupid mistake". People aren't editing each others' code to add EDOOFUS; they're using it in their own code.

Much better than simply writing /* this should never happen */ into your code.

Thanks. Slashdot crowd needs coaching though...

[aphor]

The idea isn't that FreeBSD committers can't call their errno EDOOFUS, but rather Apple can't as a matter of style. Therefore, EDOOFUS threatens to make the separation between FreeBSD and Darwin/MacOS-X one iota worse than it already is. Forking is an unfortunate necessary evil, and despite the "openness" of the code, there is another dimension of usability, which means portability in this case.

If you make your code open, but people have to add a lot of macros to adapt your code, it isn't as good as if they could just use it as-is. A good programmer is always looking for any affordable way to make his programming effort more useful with less work to make use of it. It's the wisdom of forward-thinking laziness. If your code is hard to adapt, who cares if it is free? The cost of re-use includes blood-and-sweat of integration. Ideally there would be no blood-and-sweat to reuse FreeBSD code. A bad joke (admit it: hacker humor is mostly bad inside jokes) is not a good reason to fork a file IMHO; I agree with JKH.