[ale] little rant

[Scott Plante]

Jeff wrote: " 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." 


You never got a complaint because the developers set up a cron job to "touch" all files in their home directories older than 28 days! :-P 


----- Original Message -----

From: "Jeff Lightner" <JLightner at dsservices.com> 
To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, April 1, 2015 4:39:37 PM 
Subject: Re: [ale] little rant 

Yeah but if you already did the development to share disks in a cluster is it really easier to rewrite so you no longer share than to bring that part of the code forward? 

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 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. 

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. 
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