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

[starshipeleven]

These comments clearly show that youths do not respect elders anymore

He might be older, but he ain't my daddy.

[moilami]

People offered to sponsor cloud hours for him, but he wasn't interested. ESR wants to do things his way.

Maybe he wanted a free gaming PC

[moilami]

ESR is certainly older, but he's not my elder. We share nothing except a passion for computers, and that's not enough to make me suck up to him. It's not even an age thing. I've had several co-workers ESR's age with whom I get along swimmingly. I've respectfully sat through a lot of COBOL war stories. He's just nowhere near matching his hype. I've watched him for years, and my mild celebrity respect has dwindled to moderate celebrity contempt.

His contributions are resoundingly minor. He was quite good at being around famous people and events. He wrote some pretentious articles when he was younger and contributed some code. If he wanted veneration for that, he could have stayed out of things and had nominal respect funneled his way for years. Instead, he tried to stay relevant and has effectively been promoted to the level of his incompetence.

It'd be fine if he just did what he could. But no, he's faking expertise and is a drain on the community. Being honest about being over your head is fine. There's no shame in having limits. Same with admitting that you're not good at some languages. But that's not ESR. ESR has to inflate the problem to make his efforts look herculean and his mistakes trivial. Also he likes to be racist and bigoted, and tries to pretend to be a badass. It's not relevant to the current problem, but it does add a lot of context to the underlying issue. Which is that ESR's ego is writing checks his ability can't cash.

It's like when elderly people continue to drive even when doing so is unsafe. Letting go of independence and control is really hard, and it's a drastic change for some. But when you're slow to react and have bad vision, the safety of other drivers on the road trumps your pressing need to go to a restaurant buffet on Sunday afternoons. All the respect in the world isn't going to convince me to let them legally hop in the car and endanger others. It's a different age for everyone, but it always comes in the end. ESR either needs to come to terms with his current abilities and stop overextending himself or get off the damn road.

Well argumented, the good thing in freedom is that you are free to not like someone. He was a controversial figure a long time ago, even when the times in comp culture were very free spirited.

[L_A_G]

I've said it before and I'll say it again; ESR's pig headed insistence trying to get the whole of GCC's SVN history transfered over to Git is nothing more than an absolute waste of time and resources.

Just chose a stable version from maybe 3 or 4 years ago as your "day zero" and then transfer over all the commits from there onward. After you're done with that keep the old SVN repo running as your "legacy repo" for a couple of years so that any issues that trace back to before that can still be debugged and then put it all into offline storage at multiple sites so that if anyone still needs to go back that far, the old SVN repo is available upon request.

Actually come to think of it, the folks over at the Internet Archive would probably be absolutely delighted to host the leagacy repo so it'll be available long after the GCC developers have stopped wasting resources on it.

Then again considering how long they've let ESR screw around and waste his own time on this boondoggle I'm starting to suspect that the real reason why they've just let him go at it and haven't either handed the project over to someone more capable or sent him some more capable help is this is all just an elaborate ploy to delay or even prevent GCC from ditching SVN. Maybe it's some really old guy who just wants to delay it enough that they'll be retired by the time it finally happens and they won't have to deal with any issues that may crop up.

Because I've actually seen cases where managers close to retirement age have explicitly stated that they don't want to deal with issues brought on by fundamental but necessary changes, so everyone will just have to wait until after said manager has retired until they can get to work on those changes.

These comments clearly show that youths do not respect elders anymore

Even Plato moaned about how young people are lazy and disrespectful towards their elders so it's not like this is a new complaint by any stretch of the imagination.

Really, one of the main benefits inherent in how open source software development lacks many of the management hierarchies that most corporate settings have is that you can very clearly and openly criticize management. If you're this frank about your seniors' failings in any traditional corporate setting HR will be bringing you a brown cardboard box by the end of the week if not the same day.

[geearf]

I've quickly looked at the python codebase and indeed it is a whopping 14k lines.
Now why does he need to support both python 2 and 3? Since it's a one time project, why not just pick one and stick with it? Is it a matter of using the most efficient one at the time?

[starshipeleven]

Even Plato moaned about how young people are lazy and disrespectful towards their elders so it's not like this is a new complaint by any stretch of the imagination.

Yup, and he wasn't the only one. Throughout old greek plays you can find various characters that do complain about things that sound funny now.
Like saying that "young people nowadays always eat enough to not feel hungry" or "young people always have footwear nowadays".

[fuzz]

I've quickly looked at the python codebase and indeed it is a whopping 14k lines.
Now why does he need to support both python 2 and 3? Since it's a one time project, why not just pick one and stick with it? Is it a matter of using the most efficient one at the time?

The python code was written when python 2 was more relevant. Regardless, he's abandoning it for Go and the Go code isn't any better.

ESR even calls himself "The Accidental Revolutionary". His skillset never seemingly included technical expertise; moreso a modicum of community organization and romanization of technology. He's that crazy uncle with the same few stories he repeats every year at the family get together. Charming, but I'm not sure what he's trying to prove here.

[cmsigler]

I still admire ESR for CatB: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

For those not around then, read about ESR's CML2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conf..._Menu_Language
There should be lots of 17+ year-old info on it which is searchable. The parallels to this enterprise are self-evident.

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

[moilami]

I've said it before and I'll say it again; ESR's pig headed insistence trying to get the whole of GCC's SVN history transfered over to Git is nothing more than an absolute waste of time and resources.

Just chose a stable version from maybe 3 or 4 years ago as your "day zero" and then transfer over all the commits from there onward. After you're done with that keep the old SVN repo running as your "legacy repo" for a couple of years so that any issues that trace back to before that can still be debugged and then put it all into offline storage at multiple sites so that if anyone still needs to go back that far, the old SVN repo is available upon request.

Actually come to think of it, the folks over at the Internet Archive would probably be absolutely delighted to host the leagacy repo so it'll be available long after the GCC developers have stopped wasting resources on it.

Then again considering how long they've let ESR screw around and waste his own time on this boondoggle I'm starting to suspect that the real reason why they've just let him go at it and haven't either handed the project over to someone more capable or sent him some more capable help is this is all just an elaborate ploy to delay or even prevent GCC from ditching SVN. Maybe it's some really old guy who just wants to delay it enough that they'll be retired by the time it finally happens and they won't have to deal with any issues that may crop up.

Because I've actually seen cases where managers close to retirement age have explicitly stated that they don't want to deal with issues brought on by fundamental but necessary changes, so everyone will just have to wait until after said manager has retired until they can get to work on those changes.



Even Plato moaned about how young people are lazy and disrespectful towards their elders so it's not like this is a new complaint by any stretch of the imagination.

Really, one of the main benefits inherent in how open source software development lacks many of the management hierarchies that most corporate settings have is that you can very clearly and openly criticize management. If you're this frank about your seniors' failings in any traditional corporate setting HR will be bringing you a brown cardboard box by the end of the week if not the same day.

This is cool, the first and only conspiracy theory making sense. It would be also kind of genius: "lets put ESR work on it" Oh well, my apologies to ESR for having so much fun at his expense.

[geearf]

The python code was written when python 2 was more relevant. Regardless, he's abandoning it for Go and the Go code isn't any better.

ESR even calls himself "The Accidental Revolutionary". His skillset never seemingly included technical expertise; moreso a modicum of community organization and romanization of technology. He's that crazy uncle with the same few stories he repeats every year at the family get together. Charming, but I'm not sure what he's trying to prove here.

Why didn't he stick to P2 then? It's still usable. It just seems like he's adding more hassle to this job than needed.
Why even start this project in Python when it's a hog in processing power and the GIL would not be very friendly to it? Well maybe it works with other tools than the official ones.