Law Students

pathetic, part II

By Luis

My system failed to functionally come back from suspend yesterday, which appears to have cost me a substantial part of what was the final draft of my wedding vows and ceremony. This is the second time in the past few months I’ve lost big chunks of important work because of a system crash.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, from Wikipedia, by factoryjoe, used under CC-BY-SA

I’m reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization (freedom of choice, of action) is pretty nice to have but it turns out it doesn’t do you much good when you fear for your safety or lack the ability to feed yourself. Software freedom feels fairly similar- at this point tonight, admittedly sick, angry, and stressed, I’d be pretty happy to pay for a shiny pair of handcuffs if I knew it would do c. late-90s basics like ‘work reliably,’ ‘resume and suspend’, etc.

Best wedding present GNOME (not to mention X and the kernel)¹ could give me: dedicate a release cycle (or three) to implementing test-driven development. No features, no ‘regular’ bug fixes, just writing tests and implementing the necessary build tools so that those tests are run on every commit. End the stability regressions and get us on the right track to compete with modern user-centric OSes. We used to be more stable than they are; we can be and should be again.

1. GNOME could call it 2.90; zeitgeist and shell could spend the time actually figuring out a use case, ahem

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on September 23, 2009 (boomark / email).