A response of sorts to commit robbery.

I’ve been on both sides of commit misattribution. Sometimes my commit gets sniped. Sometimes I’m the one doing the sniping. It’s very rarely intentional.

In a project like OpenBSD, we’d have three Todds and four Jasons, which led to frequent confusion. Forgetting exactly who contributed what would happen occasionally. Emails get forwarded around. And I think every new OpenBSD developer goes through the experience of having half their commits sniped for the first month because other developers think you’re submitting a patch, not requesting review.

I’d guess 1% of commits are misattributed in some way. There’s an acknowledgement, but it’s incomplete. Or it’s omitted. Or it credits somebody else entirely. I think that’s not bad overall, though it does mean 1% of first time contributors have a suboptimal experience. It sucks to be the statistic.

Could the 1% be improved? Sure, just require a few more TPS reports before commits are permitted. If the solution is that we simply need to ask the maintainers to care more, are we sure they don’t care? There’s already enough people burning out and dropping out of open source work.

I think Ariel’s story could have been framed better, with a rather less villainous counterparty. I almost didn’t read it, because I don’t care about commit drama, but the story of the debugging was really interesting. I’m glad I read that! But hey, your blog, your story. That said, I don’t think it’s possible to generalize from one event to sweeping conclusions like this is why people don’t contribute to open source. This is, maybe, why 1% of people don’t contribute to open source.

I like using pledge and unveil in my web apps. Especially unveil offers a nice degree of protection against common web app problems, like the dreaded double dot traversal. For go, I use a simple wrapper which gets pasted into each project.

more...

One of the many problems with programming in go is there’s functions, and the functions are written by people, and the people make mistakes, and the functions return errors, and now you have to check for the errors. This is all very tedious and tiresome. We can’t fix the people who cherish their imperfections as a sign of humanity, but we can change go to pretend the errors aren’t there.

more...

So you’re all in on ActivityPub. You’ve got your microblog, your long form blog, your bookmarks, your photo blog, your video blog, your discussion forum, etc. Each is a different service with a different identity. As more services catch on, users yearn for a single everything app solution to replace this multitude.

more...

I was planning on working on a redesign of a photo site, and wanted to use JPEG-XL as the preferred image format for storage. The only implementation I know of is the libjxl reference implementation written in C++. Alas, JPEG successors have not had a great security track record recently, and I would much prefer not to run this code on my server.

more...

I wanted to write a fun little experimental ActivityPub server. I have a solid idea how to handle this in go, or at least I think I do, so that’d be pretty boring. Instead, let’s try a new technology.

more...

We’ve gotten libjxl built for wasm. It was a struggle, but we got it done, and we’re ready to run it. WASM is a straightforward standard designed for ease of implementation, so this should be a walk in the park.

more...

I was planning on working on a redesign of a photo site, and wanted to use JPEG-XL as the preferred image format for storage. The only implementation I know of is the libjxl reference implementation written in C++. Alas, it hasn’t been a good week for JPEG successors, and I would much prefer not to run this code on my server.

more...

Some people, when presented with a data structure, think let’s encode this to json. Now they have two problems. Encoding and decoding. In response to this dilemma, various libraries were created, such as rust serde or go encoding/json, to facilitate drama and debate about which approach is best.

more...

ActivityPub August rolls on. Now with more (some) ActivityPub support in flak.

I held off on adding it before because I wasn’t sure how deep I wanted the integration to go, and I had some doubts about how useful minimal support would be. Time to find out.

Posts are now available as activity Article objects. There’s a minimal Person actor as well, since every post needs an author, but that’s about it. I think the objects are complete enough even for fussy implementations to accept them, but one never knows.

No inbox support, no following, no replies, etc. (Strike that. we’ve got follows and deliveries and creates now. Oh my.) Getting into delivery adds a lot more code (it did) and admin maintenance (oh well). So many little commits to fix all the bugs.

Another issue is that sometimes I like to experiment with posts that include custom scripting or styling, and that’s not going to federate well. Oh well, I guess you can figure it out and click through. Or not. WASM over AP when?