[H-GEN] Mega documentation and distro server. Was: Idea for journalling filesystems

[Greg Black]

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On 2003-07-02, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:
> 
> > To return to the original question, what's wrong with glimpse?
> 
> I don't think it's in the debian archives for some reason.  Ah,
> probably the wacky licensing.

I don't recall the licensing details.

The code is (or was) pretty wacky too when it was released.  I
recall looking at using it for some project of mine when it was
first announced on Usenet -- this makes it at least 10 years
old, as that's about when I stopped reading news.  It did some
silly stuff and I thought I'd fix the behaviour I didn't like
and maybe fix the bugs that I stumbled across.  But, when I
started reading the code, I realised that it had been written in
sendmail style[1] and that I'd really have to re-write it from
scratch if I was going to be happy.  The itch that it might have
scratched for me was nowhere near big enough for me to do that
at the time.

Since then, I've noticed lots of software includes hooks to use
it as a general search tool and I presumed that it might have
been improved over the years.  My suggestion was not based on
actual current experience with it.  I was in fact hoping to see
you try it out and report on your findings :-)

> > Greg (who has spent many hours looking for a funny shaped power
> >       supply for his wife's computer
> 
> This was all I really needed to read to know you hadn't had a good
> day.

Power supplies are easy; funny-shaped ones are tricky; and when
they come from places that have gone out of business in the time
since you made the original purchase, they're impossible.

> jason, or perhaps just the word "computer"

It's actually the conjunction of the words "wife" and "computer"
because a wife is the worst possible kind of user -- paying
customer type users believe that I'm God and accept my word on
anything; my wife knows I'm not God and finds it extremely easy
to dispute my assessments of things that impact her.

I'm going to have to try to persuade her to accept an X terminal
(which will never fly because the only ones I have handy are 19"
or 20" units with a gigantic footprint and only 8-bit colour),
or maybe a diskless workstation if it's really the disk that is
now too loud (but that involves buying a new low-profile network
card and upgrading my DHCP server and learning stuff), or maybe
finding a very quiet power supply and squeezing that into the
midget case after discarding junk like DVD and FDD and ...).  I
could scream, but I don't want the men in the white cart to come
and take me away.

Greg

[1] I use "sendmail style" to describe software that is first
    developed by clever students who, at this stage of their
    careers, know bugger-all about real world software (but are
    completely unaware of this deficiency); but they have some
    new and interesting algorithm or utility (or both) that they
    want to develop.  The result does indeed implement the new
    thing, but the overall code is full of bugs, plain wrong
    code, and utterly hideous design that makes debugging and
    further development a real pain.  The right solution, in all
    such cases, is a complete re-write from scratch.  Famous
    examples are sendmail and bind; glimpse is less well-known,
    but certainly falls into this category.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
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