stevecrox

This has to be THE dad joke meme format

I have always had 1 question.

In voyager we see the Borg have thousands of ships of varying sizes and control a vast area of space. Voyager is able to take down spheres and small cubes.

Yet in Wolf 359 a single cube attacks and destroys hundreds of star fleet vessels. If a single cube is able to have that level of effect why didn’t the borg commit a larger fleet?

You have the same issue in First Contact, they only commit 1 cube.

Considering how difficult the federation finds holding them back, attacking with 3-6 cubes would seemto assure victory

Similar to most navies.

Engineering’s workload won’t really change, they’ll do certain types of maintenance.

Most navies don’t have command staff on the bridge full time. There would be a watch officer who is fairly junior learning how to operate the ship so the down time is an opportunity for them to grow and learn.

Most navies seperate the captain and first officer, with the first officer involved in running the ship and the captain running the big picture.

So you would expect the first officer to spend the time checking on every department to ensure they are up to standard.

That would mean department heads would be running drills or bringing equipment down for maintenance so its ready.

The captain would likely be planning and thinking through the encounter.

For any free time senior officers have there is probably a mountain of reports (personnel, ship, intelligence, etc…) to read and keep tabs on.

Do not mix tabs and spaces.

Its impossible to automate checking that tabs were only used for indentation and spacing for precise alignment. So you then take on a burden of manually checking

You end up with the issue where someone didn’t realise and space idented or anouther person used tabs for precise alignment and people forget to check the whitespace characters in review and it ends up going inconsistent and becoming a huge pile of technical debt to fix.

Use only one, you can automate enforcement and ensure the code renders consistency.

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Years ago there was no way to share IDE settings between developers.

You ended up with some developers choosing a tab width of 2 spaces, some choosing 4 spaces and as there was no linting enforcement some people using 2-4 spaces depending on their IDE settings.

This resulted in an unreadable mess as stuff was idented to all sorts of random levels.

It doesn’t matter if you use tabs or spaces as long as only one type is consistently used within a project.

Spaces tends to win because inevitably there are times you need to use spaces and so its difficult to ensure a project only uses tabs for identation.

IDE’s support converting tabs into spaces based on tab width and code formatting will ensure correct indentation. You can now have centralised IDE settings so everyone gets the same setup.

Honestly 99% of people don’t care about formatting (they only care when consistency isn’t enforced and code is hard to read), there is always one person who wants a 60 charracter line width or only tabs or double new lined parathensis. Who then sucks up huge amounts of the team time arguing their thing is a must while they code in emacs, unlike the rest of the team using an actual ide.

I am actually arguing for a stable ABI.

The few times I have had to compile out of tree drivers for the linux kernel its usually failed because the ABI has changed.

Each time I have looked into it, I found code churn, e.g. changing an enum to a char (or the other way) or messing with the parameter order.

If I was empire of the world, the linux kernel would be built using conan.io, with device trees pulling down drivers as dependencies.

The Linux ABI Headers would move out into their own seperately managed project. Which is released and managed at its own rate. Subsystem maintainers would have to raise pull requests to change the ABI and changing a parameter from enum to char because you prefer chars wouldn’t be good enough.

Each subsystem would be its own “project” and with a logical repository structure (e.g. intel and amd gpu drivers don’t share code so why would they be in the same repo?) And built against the appropriate ABI version with each repository released at its own rate.

Unsupported drivers would then be forked into their own repositories. This simplifies depreciation since its external to the supported drivers and doesn’t need to be refactored or maintained. If distributions can build them and want to include the driver they can.

Linus job would be to maintain the core kernel, device trees and ABI projects and provide a bill of materials for a selection of linux kernel/abi/drivers version which are supported.

Lastly since every driver is a descrete buildable component, it would make it far easier for distributions to check if the driver is compatible (e.g. change a dependency version and build) with the kernel ABI they are using and provide new drivers with the build.

None of this will ever happen. C/C++ developers loath dependency management and people can ve stringly attached to mono repos for some reason.

The linux kernel is very old school in how it is run and originally a big part of the DevSecOps movement was removing a lot of manual overhead.

Moving on to something like Gitea (codeberg) would give you a better diff view and is quicker/easier than posting a patch to a mailing list.

The branching model of the kernel is something people write up on paper that looks great (much like Gitflow) but is really time consuming to manage. Moving to feature branch workflow and creating a release branches as part of the release process allows a ton of things to be automated and simplified.

Similarly file systems aren’t really device specific, so you could build system tests for them for benchmarking and standard use cases.

Setting up a CI to perform smoke testing and linting, is fairly standard.

Its really easy to setup a CI to trigger when a new branch/pr is created/updated, this means review becomes reduced to checking business logic which makes reviews really quick and easy.

Similarly moving on to a decent issue tracker, Jira’s support for Epic’s/stories/tasks/capabilities and its linking ability is a huge simplifier for long term planning.

You can do things like define OKR’s and then attach Epics to them and Stories/tasks to epics which lets you track progress to goals.

You can use issues the way the linux community currently uses mailing lists.

Combined with a Kanban board for tracking, progress of tickets. You remove a ton of pain.

Although open source issue trackers are missing the key productivity enablers of Jira, which makes these improvements hard to realise.

The issue is people, the linux kernel maintainers have been working one way for decades. Getting them to adopt new tools will be heavily resisted, same with changing how they work.

Its like everyone outside, knows a breaking the ABI definition from the sub system implementation would create a far more stable ABI which would solve a bunch of issues and allow change when needed, except no one in the kernel will entertain the idea.

Maven has unit and integration test phases and there are a multitude of plugins designed to hook into those phases but there are constraints by design.

Trying to hook everything into the build management system is a source of technical debt, your using a tool for something it wasn’t designed.

I would look at what makes sense within the build management system and what makes sense in a CI pipeline.

CI tools have different DSL and usually provide a means to manage environments. Certain integration and system level tests are best performed there.

For instance I keep system tests as a seperate managed project. The project can be executed from developer machines for local builds but I also create a small build pipeline to build the project, deploy it and run the system tests against it triggered by pull requests.

This is why I say the build management system doesn’t really change, because you should treat everything as descrete standalone components.

The Parent POM gets updates once every six months, the basic build verification CI pipeline only changes to the latest language release, etc…

Projects which try to embed gitflow into a pom or integrate CD into the gradle file are the unbuildable messes I get asked to fix.

Maven has a high learning curve, but once learned it is incredibly simple to use.

That high bar is created by the tool configuration. You can change and hack everything, but you have to understand how Maven works to do so. This generally blocks people from doing really stupid things, because you have to learn how maven works to successfully modify it and in doing so you learn why you shouldn’t.

This is the exact weakness of Gradle, the barrier for modification is far lower and the tool is far less rigid. So you get lots of people who are still learning implement all sorts of weird and terrible practice.

The end result is I can usually dust off someone elses old maven project and it will build immediately using “mvn clean install”, about half the gradle projects I have been brought in on won’t without reverse engineering effort because they have things hard coded all over them. A not small percentage are so mangled they can’t be built without the dev who wrote it’s machine.

Also you really shouldn’t be tinkering with your build pipelines that much. Initial constraints determine the initial solution, then periodically you review them to improve. DevSecOps exists to speed development and ease support it isn’t a goal in of itself

It never quite finds its grove.

Season 1, 2 & 3 all had fantastic premises I would have loved 7 seasons of but were all unrelated and concluded within a season.

Season 4 actually demonstrates the missed opportunity, they deal with the fall out of season 3

For example if you think of the scene set in “A Vulkan Hello”, you would have ended up with an Action focussed version of DS9.

You didn’t need a spore drive, Jason Isaacs could have stayed the same and we could still have watched scientists struggle to become soliders with the war causing the type of fall out we see in Season 4.

Try to do it and get back to me.

For extra fun try to do it in cloud and server, you’ll realise some stuffis server only, some cloud only and the docs don’t tell you which one is true

I want a build job to be triggered when a merge request is raised/changed to verify merge requests. Primarily I want it to comment/annotate changes so peer review focusses on logic and warnings are clear.

I can do this with Concourse, Circle, Jenkins and Github Actions on Azure Devops, Bitbucket Cloud, Bitbucket Server & Github. All Gitlab can tell you is pass/fail, which was good in 2003 but seriously lacking in 2023.

Similarly I want the ability to trigger a release and supply a desired version for the release (or someway to achieve that since our projects follow semantic versioning).

The release DSL is incomplete and could not work on server/cloud last time I used it. The page claims it can do alot but there is a hole in it and even the writer clearly knew.

I want the ability to specify multiple reusable pipelines, in a central place. This is not possible in cloud.

Lastly I would like to have multiple potential pipelines in a repository (e.g. smoke test and release). You can hack this in via variables. This will/won’t work depending specifically on the runner for your job. if self hosted or cloud you’ll notice different parsing behaviour depending on what host it runs on. This is shocking.

I have an email somewhere where I went through every GitLab CI DSL and documented which didn’t consistently work, which only worked consistently on cloud and which only worked on server. Also things like release that are broken on both.

The only way to make it work is to use multi stage docker builds and if your doing that build bot and a bash script would be better.

Gitlab marketing docs heavily mislead you on its capabilities. Technically they are correct, but the way something works is reality isn’t often useful (epic boards are a great example).

This would be ok, but It’s really tightly integrated and doesn’t provide means for external tools to hook into it usefully.

For example I think GitLabs CI is the worst on the market but if you integrate another CI you don’t have a means to feedback information into Gitlab.