345
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
345 points (98.9% liked)
Linux
48400 readers
698 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Did not know the thing about purposefully adding rogue tabs to kconfig files to catch poorly written parsers. That's fucking hilarious and I'd love to have the kind of clout to get away with something like that rather than having to constantly work around other people's mistakes.
I write a lot of scripts that engineers need to run. I used to really try to make things 'fail soft' so that even if one piece failed the rest of the script would keep running and let you know which components failed and what action you needed to take to fix the problem.
Eventually I had so many issues with people assuming that any errors that didn't result in a failure were safe to ignore and crucial manual steps were being missed. I had to start making them 'fail hard' and stop completely when a step failed because it was the only way to get people to reliably perform the desired manual step.
Trying to predict and account for other people's behavior is really tricky, particularly when a high level of precision is required.
Always fail soft in underlying code and hard in user space IMHO