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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."
EDFS seems like it's obscure enough to not offend, but true enough to the original sentiment to fly for those "in the know".
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
Take a look at the freakin' URL, it's from a server run by Google!
I somehow think that their daily traffic vastly outpaces Slashdot's on just about any given day.
Somebody mod this karma whoring post down please?
Obviously the kernel developers need OUR help to sort this sorry mess out. Everyone, please make a google news account ASAP and put your two cents in. If all of us together put our minds to it, and posted our opinions on that thread, I'm sure they would appreciate our help in solving this problem quickly and efficiently. Thanks.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
From: Michael Meltzer (mjm@michaelmeltzer.com) Subject: Re: A modest proposal for better errno values...
View this article only Newsgroups: fa.freebsd.hackers Date: 2003-05-13 16:58:07 PST
> #define EDOOFUS 88 /* Programming error */
#define E370HSSV 88 /* Programming error */
I think this one keeps the orinigal sprite of EDOOFUS, I will now crawl back into my cave :-)
MJM
PS. For the non dyslexics try reading it upsidedown.
Priceless...
Sure, shift the blame from the programmer (/* Programming error */) to the user(EUSERERR)
I don't mean to troll - some of my best friends are FreeBSD users - but somehow, this sort of thing doesn't surprise me. In every circumstance I've ever tried (and believe me, I've tried), I've found FreeBSD coders to be somewhat... elitest. The assumption that anyone who makes a mistake is a 'doofus' doens't surprise me much at all. Oddly enough, though, this is exactly the sort of childishness that many lead FreeBSD team members accuse Linux of.
Why not just change it? Why make it into an issue? Is this some kind of 'fight the man' issue? You'd think they'd have gotten an ego boost from Apple using their code - repeatedly - and by trying to work *with* the community instead of just taking and leaving.
I tried FreeBSD because I thought it would be neat, and it was, until I had to ask someone for help. Then I went back to Linux. Unfortunately, they don't seem to realize that people are people too. Help is more useful than insults.
--Dan
For those who are left in the dark, the bike shed reference is the following:
16.19. Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?
The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.
More details at the link.
All weakness is within you, As is all courage.
I think that many of the developrs on FreeBSD will look at this and laugh and it will get changed. Does anyone check errno anymore anyway (lol)
Only 'flamers' flame!
it could be EURNOTEXPECTED2UNDERSTANDTHIS ;)
that gives me an Idea!
national.. no, GLOBAL slashdot Google day.
Once a year, at noon GMT aeverybody does a search on google. I bet we might have such n effect, that it might take as long as 3 seconds to return reslts!
or..aa...not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
EBUTHEADCOMPUTERCOMPANY
No, it is not a troll. it reference tha outcome of something that happened between Apple and a certian astronomer.
of course, if you are actually qualified to judge statemment about Apple, I wouldn't need this disclaimer. butthead.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It must be when a rather innocuous request to freebsd-hackers makes it to slashdot! Just to set the record straight, I didn't do this "at Apple's request", I did this because it seemed silly to fork a header file over the name of a single entry in it and, as I said in my message to -hackers, I just thought I'd check to see if FreeBSD was willing to change it before Apple changed it in their own sources. Anyone with time to waste can see the original message (and the thread which followed) here:- hackers /2003-May/000791.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd
Personally, I rather liked the EDONTPANIC suggestion...
- Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
ESOSUMI
EUCANTCODE
/~mikeg
Sure, and after that let's see if the slashdot effect can also
bring down the Yahoo index and the Microsoft homepage.
Anyway, back to topic...
if errno 42 were still available I'd definately vote for EDONTPANIC,
but as it stands I'm thinking maybe an acronym that shouldn't offend
people who don't happen to know what it means. You know, EWTF or
somesuch. If it were actually a user error (as the person who
suggested EUSERERR must have thought) I'd say EPEBCAK, but the
EDOOFUS error was actually being used for errors in the programmer's
own code, so something more like ECANTHAPPEN makes much better sense
than EUSERERR. But ECANTHAPPEN isn't really all that funny. (Then
again, EDOOFUS is pretty marginal in that regard too.) There's
always EONETWOFIVETHREESIRTHREE, I guess.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
hmm, Can anyone else picture the strings leading from Jordan's fingers to Steve Job's fingers. I mean cmon, does it really matter? Its like asking a friend to build you a bikeshed then bitching because they didn't do a good enough job.
Frankly most people found it to be a very innocous request. Jordan never demanded anyone change it, and pointed out that if need be, Apple will maintain the changes themselves. The point was that should people start using this ERRNO outside of the kernel, then programmers will need to maintain two different sets of ERRNO values. Just kinda silly.
I think that it adds more character to freebsd than a stale, sterilized and bland OS.
EDOOFUS may add more character, but I think it adds the wrong character. Frankly, it isn't even that funny. Who the hell uses the word doofus anyway?
Then he has the balls to say that he likes a specific name.
Saving some face there Jordan? Good try bud.
Frankly, if you don't think this is a lot funnier, you need to get a life... or possibly actually sit your ass down and read Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Even Wilko Bulte though this was funny and suggested changing the error number to 42.
Ohh yeah, One more thing. Fix it yourself lazy ass.
Jordan has already said he would fix it himself. He was simply trying to avoid future incompatibilities.
Do us a favor, if you are a FreeBSD user then please consider switching to Linux.
P.S. I use OpenBSD
Touche. Perhaps my comments were unjust and a little harsh. I appolgize if I offended anyone that was not my intent.
It does seem to be a small request. However does one small change start a torrent of requests? I kind of doubt it but you never know.
The feeling in that thread seems to be that Apple has contributed little back but feels that they have the clout to make trivial requests. Perhaps even using Jordans respect in the open source community to get what they want done.
Maybe Jordan is just trying to help FreeBSD by improving their image in the corporate community.
Maybe it will turn out to be a innocent request. Time will tell.
Just a thought.
RiGgA
Apple can profit from the labors of the FreeBSD folks, that's cool, I'm in favor of that, but I draw the line when Apple decides it wants to interfere with the FreeBSD culture.
I also find it slighly hypocritical that Apple wants to change a little-known and hardly-used identifier after publically code-naming one of their projects "Butthead Astronomer" in honor of Carl Sagan. Also, as someone on the newsgroup mentioned: The Boolean variable "STUPID" [in Apple Pascal I] --documented as STUdent Programmer ID-- was set TRUE by default, as shipped by Apple Computer.
"It's Dot Com!"
JKH posted this to the developers' list. I don't think he was intending to throw weight around, but more likely ask the guys who actively develop to make a simple change.
Only when it becomes Slashdot discussion does it suddenly seem like he's using politics to change FreeBSD from behind the Apple tree.
Is this in the 5? I did not see anything in 4.8. If so, that will shed some light on the next version of OS X... er Darwin.
Yeah, slow news day indeed.
Anyway having wasted my time reading through the thread I might as well waste a few more seconds venting my opinion.
First off, whoever the idiot at Apple who is pushing you to fork to avoid the horrible indignity of having the word doofus in the source code is, he should be fired. Yesterday. God, that's just lame. Particularly considering it's in a place that amounts to a note amongst the programmers saying 'if you get this you did something really dumb' - it's not going to users and it's perfectly appropriate in context. I read all your soft-pedaling about not being humour impaired yourself, and I think you needed to do that, this request is just so bloody silly it's unbelievable.
That said, I do think the EDONTPANIC suggestion is a very good one. There is nothing wrong with EDOOFUS, but EDONTPANIC is better, so maybe something good came of this.
Of course my opinion means nothing, my only connection to FreeBSD is the fact I'm typing this on my TiBook, and I'm going back to work now. I don't envy you, though, if your job requires you to cater to people that are willing to fork because EDOOFUS offends them then you are really earning your money in my opinion. Glad someone is, if Apple ever dies I'll cry, I really love my TiBook and I would hate to ever have to go back to an x86 based laptop. ;)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Jordan has a point (as he usually does when he speaks up). An errno like that isn't something that's going to be burried in some kernel code for no one to see - that's something that programmers will have to use. I do not use silly variables and function names in my software for several reasons, #1 they aren't descriptive generally and #2 it's just not professional.
..... but that's just my opinion, I could be wrong..
I also agree with Jordan that this individual errno name is trivial but I believe his concern is that it's the start of a trend that could make programming for BSD an exercise in trash talking and English slang.
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.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
It is damned funny. But I do think it at least supports his contention that he does, in fact, have a sense of humor.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
You know, I agree with almost everything in your post. The one thing on which I don't think with you: it's not going to users and it's perfectly appropriate in context. I have to preface with the thought that people without a sense of humor are probably not cut out for programming in a community effort, but I believe it is (slightly) wrong to insult people (even tounge-in-cheek) just for coding a bug.
First, free software is partly about removing the barriers for users who want to become programmers and ultimately contributors. It is counterproductive to start with an assumption of us-and-them user-and-programmer duality. Second, I believe that the people who deserve the DOOFUS title are the ones that don't think they need to trap error values, because it seems to work 99% of the time for them.
You never can be sure how fragile another person's ego is, or how dependent they are on their fragile ego for day-to-day living. None of that has anything to do with the value of the contribution they can make to the FreeBSD codebase if they are motivated to solve a personal problem that affects other FreeBSD users (or hackers) too. So, in the spirit of "Be lenient in what you require; be strict in what you provide" I think it is a worthwhile long-term concern. The best way to think about it is that every talented programmer is potentially an ego problem, and every effort to facilitate cooperation and harmony will pay off down the road.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
EU screwed up? SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES!! Smart little propagandist we are, huh? :D
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
is that coders can take a joke.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
This was an explicit instruction given to programmers at a company I used to work for which will, for the time being, remain anonymous. :)
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Not as good as the Amiga error message off "Guru Meditation" and the text flashed diffrent colours fantastic your computer was going to find enightentment you can belive the stories of it being designed by hippies in a tent and it would explain why there where always spliff butts behind it or maybe that was just my older sister.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
Simple guided process:
^.^
The DEC developers, especially the RSX family, had a puckish sense of humor and included all sorts of easter eggs in their products. Error codes were numeric, and had symbols of the form IE.XXX, where XXX was supposed to be as mnemonic as possible. Error number 69 was for "no network path"...the symbol got assigned "IE.NFW"...for "No FXXXXing Way"...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
How can they complain...isn't one of their sound files named sosueme? If that isn't a problem, this definitely isn't. Perhaps if it was aimed towards the user it would be.
That means you are full of antidisestablishmentarianism, dude! (Yay, I finally found an occasion to use that word!)
Wrong. Antidisestablishmentarianism is opposal to the separation of church and state, which doesn't have a damn thing to do with this. Nice try, though.
.
By the way, while the antidisestablishmentarianist movement has been dead for some time, someone recently brought it back with a movement called neoantidisestablishmentarianism. If, like me, you don't think neoantidisestablishmentarianism is a good philosophy at all, you can join my contraneoantidisestablishmentarianism movement and behave contraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically all the time.
But if you just want people to think you are a contraneoantidisestablishmentarianist, and you aren't really, then what you are doing is acting pseudocontraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically
Posts like the parent are why I often read /. at a threshold of -1. That was hilarious given the context, and seeing as how the "*BSD is dying" troll gets posted here on at least a daily basis, I'd say it's more of an inside joke than a troll. Everyone knows, of course, that BSD isn't dying at all.