Monday, June 23, 2003

More on "Why Software Sucks"

So I found a null-pointer-dereference bug in Pango, one of the components required to build GTK (the graphical toolkit used by Gnome). It's one of those "oops, I put active code in an assert() statement" bugs, so it only shows up when compiling in release mode.

Fixed it, and decided to be a good citizen by filing a bug in the Gnome Buzilla system and sent in my patch.

Today, I got a reply essentially stating that it's my fault for trying to compile in release mode.

This is why software sucks. No, it's not because software is complex (which it is) or difficult to maintain (which it is). It's because people are either stupid, have a bad attitude, or both.

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