An Anecdote about why doing the wrong thing is bad.

An Anecdote about why doing the wrong thing is bad.

Actually, this should be obvious to some, but, apparently, people love to do the wrong thing.

Taken from: ext4, application expectations and power management by Matthew Garrett

<quote>

[1] xfs behaves like ext4 in this respect, so the obvious argument is that all our applications have been broken for years and so why are you complaining now. To which the obvious response is "Approximately anyone who ever used xfs expected their data to vanish if their machine crashed so nobody used it by default and seriously who gives a shit". xfs is a wonderful filesystem for all sorts of things, but it's lousy for desktop use for precisely this reason.

</quote>

Once i was using XFS as my desktop file system. Anyone who knows me knows i like to do things differently just because i can. That's just how i do things.

One day, my system decides that it wants to crash, probably something to do with JBoss, but i don't remember exactly. (Not to offend JBoss developers, i was using a version that wasn't meant to work.) When i bring my computer back up, Firefox complains that there's something wrong and i can't start it again. I essentially lost my entire Firefox profile.

Let's be honest here, XFS is probably a bad idea to be used for a desktop. Let's just pretend someone's running an LTSP server on top of XFS. Or rather, someone's running that on ext4. Let's just forget about the LTSP part then, an average user. I'm sure alot of Firefox profiles have gone down screaming in flames. I'm sure some one has used this as an excuse to blame Firefox for being shitty, and then gone off blaming Open Source for being so bad.

The real problem isn't exactly what one programmer made as a mistake. A huge percentage of code is copy and paste from other projects. It's really easy for mistakes to persist over a large number of projects. I really can't blame Firefox for being any more at fault than XFS, Fedora, Open Source, or Buddha. This was just a moment where i went "Aha! This explains everything". Well mostly everything.