Hohndel agreed but added that the industry needs to support these smaller projects -- and not only with money. "Companies need to engage with these projects. Have your company adopt a couple of such projects and just participate. Read the code, review the patches, and provide moral support to the maintainers. It's as simple as that."
Really glad he said this, I keep seeing posts about how all these big companies could solve the problem by just throwing money at small projects and while that is better than nothing it would help way more to have their own developers helping to review and fix issues.
Did not know the thing about purposefully adding rogue tabs to kconfig files to catch poorly written parsers. That's fucking hilarious and I'd love to have the kind of clout to get away with something like that rather than having to constantly work around other people's mistakes.
I write a lot of scripts that engineers need to run. I used to really try to make things 'fail soft' so that even if one piece failed the rest of the script would keep running and let you know which components failed and what action you needed to take to fix the problem.
Eventually I had so many issues with people assuming that any errors that didn't result in a failure were safe to ignore and crucial manual steps were being missed. I had to start making them 'fail hard' and stop completely when a step failed because it was the only way to get people to reliably perform the desired manual step.
Trying to predict and account for other people's behavior is really tricky, particularly when a high level of precision is required.
It is a developer milestone :) when you learn to be a resilient applicant is about recovery situation you perfect understanding. Fail fast everything else. Repeat 1000 times, you have something
