ESR Switches To Threadripper But His GCC SVN-To-Git Conversion Could Still Take Months

[fuzz]

I'm afraid ESR is the Gilderoy Lockhart of the Linux world :-\

Could you elaborate on this?

[cmsigler]

Could you elaborate on this?

Um.... Of course, just IMHO.... (Not a Potter series expert.) The Lockhart character always made himself the center of attention and took credit for work not his own(?).

[Syfer]

Um.... Of course, just IMHO.... (Not a Potter series expert.) The Lockhart character always made himself the center of attention and took credit for work not his own(?).

It's quite an understatement. Lockhart was an expert at memory charms (brain washing), and nothing else. He used that expertise to make the real heroes forget their contributions to society, while selling books where he took credit for their exploits (monster killings, etc.). He tried to run away from Hogwarts when a monster showed up, and after the monsters defeat, tried to use a memory charm to take credit for it.

I guess a computing parallel would be if someone replaced copyright notices on a program. I'm sure there are a few real world examples - I think on of the OpenSSL forks did something similar to change the license.

[Blahblah]

People ITT are letting their ESR-hate get in the way of logical planning. Yes, the GCC devs should throw away decades of commit history so that they can work in git a few months faster. (Or, worse yet, keep the commit history, but in a malformed state that will probably break git blames at some point in the future).

[fuzz]

Um.... Of course, just IMHO.... (Not a Potter series expert.) The Lockhart character always made himself the center of attention and took credit for work not his own(?).

Ah, I didn't even know you were referencing harry potter . Even googled it and thought the name was a coincidence hahaha

[cmsigler]

Ah, I didn't even know you were referencing harry potter . Even googled it and thought the name was a coincidence hahaha

Again, I want to express my ESR admiration for CatB, but other track records haven't been so... stellar.... I myself believe there's nothing wrong with being a far better software philosopher than software architect/engineer. There's no shame in that, except that in this world the top dogs are almost exclusively the programming gurus.

[fuzz]

Again, I want to express my ESR admiration for CatB, but other track records haven't been so... stellar.... I myself believe there's nothing wrong with being a far better software philosopher than software architect/engineer. There's no shame in that, except that in this world the top dogs are almost exclusively the programming gurus.

I agree completely, I own a copy of CatB myself and consider myself a philosopher as well.

[Guest]

Perhaps he could improve the performance of his machine by switching to Xfce like the Swedish people?

I think he uses i3, so it would be pretty hard to reduce overhead from a setup with just a window manager.

[Guest]

It's quite an understatement. Lockhart was an expert at memory charms (brain washing), and nothing else. He used that expertise to make the real heroes forget their contributions to society, while selling books where he took credit for their exploits (monster killings, etc.). He tried to run away from Hogwarts when a monster showed up, and after the monsters defeat, tried to use a memory charm to take credit for it.

I guess a computing parallel would be if someone replaced copyright notices on a program. I'm sure there are a few real world examples - I think on of the OpenSSL forks did something similar to change the license.

RMS fits this description perfectly. I got used to people playing down his contributions, ignoring how many seminal projects he started.

[Terrablit]

Yes, the GCC devs should throw away decades of commit history so that they can work in git a few months faster. (Or, worse yet, keep the commit history, but in a malformed state that will probably break git blames at some point in the future).

I think the project is useful, but not excessively so. It's going to be a massive repository, and lots of FOSS devs work on bandwidth-limited connections. There's over 30 years of commits there. And we could just keep the older history available for browsing. That said, we'd all still rather have the history converted than not. Especially recent commits that could be used for bisecting. But it's definitely not worth the time and effort invested in it. The timeline provides a lot of context. It's not just a few months.

ESR offered his "help" converting the repository back in 2015-08-23. So it's been almost four years since he inserted himself into the process by negging all the existing options and praising his own expertise and tools. Check the GCC mailing list threads from May 2015. There's two relevant threads in the middle of that page: "Offer of help with move to git" and "Moving to git". Jason Merrill accepted that offer and delegated the task to ESR on 2015-08-27, which was when ESR ordered his extra 32GB of ram funded by Patreon subscribers for the machine I talked about earlier in the thread.

People ITT are letting their ESR-hate get in the way of logical planning.

There's an obvious reason why everyone's fed up with him over this. It's almost four years later and he's still not done passing the buck. And he's super casual about it not being done, too. Honestly, we could have had someone manually walk through SVN commit-by-commit and recommit the data to git and they would've been done already. But it's okay because there's a "65% chance" he can have it done by September. That sounds promising and all, but don't forget that ESR also said that it's "not high enough for me to make any hard promises."

GCC members are still being way nice and respectful about him dragging the conversion down. Anonymous forum members? Not so much.