[ale] little rant

[DJ-Pfulio]

I was a professional cross-platform software developer for over a decade.

On 04/01/2015 04:39 PM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> 
> My own view isn't that it is cheaper but that many developers are lazy and
> sloppy.   This is one reason so many of them squirrel away code in their home
> directories rather than bothering to use source code control properly and
> therefore end up reintroducing bugs fixed in earlier releases into later
> ones.   They take their own copy from before the bug fix, then when
> developing something new push it back out.   I'd like to think this was

Some software is provided only as tgz source.  If you have 50 dependencies and
the source website doesn't make it easy to get the latest version with bug
fixes, yes - it is highly likely that you'll reuse the previously downloaded
version.  With git and source packages, this should have mostly gone away.
OTOH, I suspect Intel and any HW makers with "sample code" which gets used
without much, if any, modification still falls under that problem.


> restricted to internal coding but the number of 3rd party and/or commercial
> products (including OSes) I've used that reintroduced previously fixed bugs
> in later versions shows it isn't.

Just look at the UPnP and WPS flaws in routers.

> At one job I got so fed up with having to "fix" a "broken" confg file so
> often that I finally created a cron job that periodically deleted everything
> older than 1 month in developers' home directories.    Since none of them
> could ever admit they'd been doing things without checking them in I never
> got a single complaint.

DevOps tools solve that these days - ansible, chef, rexify and that other
choice. Or just set tiny quotas.