Secret life of the OpenSolaris code
OpenSolaris community manager Jim Grisanzio told ZDNet Australia the code had been relatively free of profanity even before Sun filtered it prior to release. "They went through the code for a great many things," he said, "and I'm sure they cleaned a word or two. Or three."
"But you know, when I got involved in this project last year, even at that time, no one was worried about any comments in the code. Maybe we have clean engineers, I don't know, but for the most part I've heard it's pretty clean."
A cursory search through the code revealed almost a complete lack of commonly-used profanity. This is in contrast with other examples such as the leaked Windows 2000 code and the Linux kernel project -- which are famous in coding circles for the number of rude words programmers have included in an adult-rated effort to describe how a particular portion of the code works.
But the OpenSolaris code is not entirely clean. "This is an ugly PCMCIA hack - ugh!", wrote one developer in the comments section of his code.
Another was realistic about his coding confusion. "Couldn't find the damn thing," he said.
"The following cast 'makes it all work'. Yes, it's ugly," admitted a third.
The much-vaunted dynamic tracing (dtrace) feature of Sun's system may not be as safe to use as most people think.
"This bit me in the ass a couple of times, so lets toss this in as a cursory sanity check," wrote one careful developer in the dtrace section.
Another tried his hand at predicting the future of system speeds. "As of this writing (1996) a clock rate of more than about 10 kHz seems utterly ridiculous, although this observation will no doubt seem quaintly amusing one day," he wrote.
Religion was a common theme in the code. "Oops, did not find this signature, so we must advance on the next signature in the SUA and hope to God that it is in the susp format, or we get hosed," said one developer.
"God help us all if someone changes how lex works," wrote another. "Oh God, what an ugly pile of architecture," moaned a third.
However, the real potty-mouths appeared to be open-source developers whose software made it into the OpenSolaris release in the form of the Perl and GRUB projects.
- Login or register to post comments
- Printer-friendly version
- 4447 reads
- PDF version
More in Tux Machines
- Highlights
- Front Page
- Latest Headlines
- Archive
- Recent comments
- All-Time Popular Stories
- Hot Topics
- New Members
digiKam 7.7.0 is releasedAfter three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. |
Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
|
Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future TechThe metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. |
today's howtos
|
Recent comments
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago