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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In November 2019, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the popular core-js library, lost an appeal to overturn an 18-month prison sentence imposed for driving his motorcycle into two pedestrians, killing one of them.
As a result, he's expected to be unavailable to update core-js, a situation that has project contributors and other developers concerned about the fate of his code library.
Pushkarev, known as zloirock on GitHub, mentioned the possibility he may end up incarcerated in a thread last May discussing the addition of post-install ads to generate revenue for a project that so many use and so few pay for. He anticipated he may need to pay for legal or medical expenses related to his motorcycle accident.
In that thread, developer Nathan Dobrowolski asked, "If you are in prison, who will maintain [core-js] then?"
Pushkarev offered no answer. Since his conviction last October, the need to resolve that question has become more than theoretical.
-- submitted from IRC
So dear soylentil developers, are there any libraries you are depending on that have a single point of failure?
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday March 29 2020, @08:50PM (8 children)
What's hard to figure out about the problem? Either fork it or wait for the developer to get out of jail. It's not like the code will spoil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @09:03PM
Exactly although a JS lib is not exactly a real killer [murderpedia.org] piece of software.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday March 29 2020, @09:14PM (6 children)
It's not like the code will spoil.
In the craptastic world of Web two-oh, code has a very short shelf life: it needs updating every two hours, whenever a new exploit gets found out - not hard in the huge unnecessary stacks that underpin the internet we know today - and whenever it needs to support the new shiny du jour.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Sunday March 29 2020, @11:07PM (3 children)
What particularly irritates me is many of the things that will be done with these shinies could already be implemented using older web technologies. In my mind one of the few legitimate uses of recent website client libraries is to build something that will work across many different devices and browsers, but even then, if you just kept it simple (like this website!), there wouldn't be such problems to begin with!
It's not just endlessly reinventing the wheel, it's often dropping the new wheels onto the piles of old wheels underneath. I've noticed similar things on Linux where looking for how to set something up in ALSA, I find many forum posts telling someone to just install PulseAudio (I'm yet to find anything that I need to do that PulseAudio can do and ALSA can't)! The answer to how to solve one simple problem should not be to install an additional layer of complexity over the top of whatever you were using.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NCommander on Monday March 30 2020, @09:55AM (2 children)
Pulse can dynamically reroute audio streams and stream over the network. It also acts as an intermediately layer for the 500+ sound APIs that have appeared over the years.
I don't like Pulse, but ALSA is a fucking nightmare to work with, and a horrid case of NIH after OSS came out of the kernel.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @06:51PM
Adding in such performance overhead to PulseAudio so that it is network transparent was as dumb of a mistake as was adding network transparency to X11's low level drawing commands.
Optimizing for network transparency should be done at the application layer, not the audio layer.
I'm afraid X11 continues to inspire open source programmers--with bad ideas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2020, @01:02AM
Pulse also sucks up around 5% of my cpu when idle. It also puts out white noise after a while, when you least expect it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @12:51AM
Worse. If it isn't updated at least once an hour it will be labelled as "unmaintained" and shunned by developers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @03:00PM
It needs updating every two hours, whenever a new
exploitchange in pastel coloring or removal of visual hints gets found outThere, fixed that for you.