SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Linux 5.9 Dropping Soft Scrollback Support From FB + VGA Console Code - Phoronix:
VGACON/FBCON for the basic Linux console has supported a software scrollback buffer with the Shift + PageUp keyboard sequence for scrolling up in the output for contents out of view. But with most people not making heavy use of the frame-buffer console these days and the code being unmaintained, it's being stripped out from Linux 5.9.
As a post-5.9-rc5 change, Linus dropped the FBCON code and the similar VGACON scrollback support.
[Linus] Torvalds wrote, "This (and the VGA soft scrollback) turns out to have various nasty small special cases that nobody really is willing to fight. The soft scrollback code was really useful a few decades ago when you typically used the console interactively as the main way to interact with the machine, but that just isn't the case any more. So it's not worth dragging along."
I dunno about you lot but I absolutely still use soft scrollback. Not every day by any means but it's damned near essential if you or a system or driver update have somehow managed to get X into a hosed state and you don't normally have sshd enabled.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @07:17AM (16 children)
It sounds like he cannot find a competent developer willing to maintain the code.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Wednesday September 16 2020, @10:50AM (10 children)
> It sounds like he cannot find a competent developer willing to maintain the code.
To be fair, seeing how Linux seems to be progressing to Windows levels of reliability, stability and "black box behaviour", I think there is a general shortage of competent developers in the Linux ecosystem, which would affect the kernel moreso than others, as they seem to hold themselves to higher standard of development than the rest of the ecosystem.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 16 2020, @12:30PM (6 children)
People are "aging out". This includes developers.
Once you retire, unless you're autistic, you have other things to do. And more health problems. And an awareness that you're nearer the end than the beginning.
Think of the challenge the laid off devs who worked on Firefox faced. Some of them will never find another paying job, especially in this environment unless they switch to working on closed source. Others will drop out of the industry entirely and become bus drivers or truckers or whatever, same as previous downturns.
Others will retire early.
In all cases, institutional knowledge will be lost. Because people don't just get older - they get old.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @03:43PM
Yup, and the new kids can't afford the time and resources required to become skilled developers, so we aren't able to replace the old guard. This is a major problem across the entire industry.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 16 2020, @03:48PM (2 children)
Then they die or sometimes they die when they're younger too. Still, the people who have had the most affect on modern computers aren't all that old. The old geezers that have died off or are dying, worked on precursors to modern computers. Just saying that old programmers aren't all that old, usually.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 16 2020, @04:19PM (1 child)
This is an industry / idiocracy where the average half life of an engineer is 3 years. It's either up to management or out. And those management jobs are reserved for people whose skill set includes ass kissing and back stabbing.
And after a certain age, you're less hireable and are expected to work for less. If old companies like Boeing haven't learned the value of institutional knowledge, you can be sure that the software industry hasn't either.
Plus every downturn many people leave permanently. There's only so many startups that you can be in that crash and burn before you get really really cynical. And only so much crunch bs before you get fed up with incompetent assholes who continually try to bargain down how much time something should take.
And the rise of amateurism - UX Experience Professional is just one example. At least with software, we have objective measures to get rid of some of the mistakes. Doesn't compile? No bs-omg around that - it's broken . It produces wrong output? Same thing. It breaks something else? It leaks memory? There's a race condition and the program just stops running and the cpu is pegged?
But bad management is always an "opinion". And your opinions don't count because you don't have the title or connections.
Hard to argue with the experience of coders who took jobs doing construction or driving a truck during a downturn and find they're happier.
In this industry over 40 is old, over 50 is unemployable.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @07:16PM
In my many years in this industry, I have never seen an "up or out" shop. It has in fact been the opposite, if you know what you are doing, management is not going to disturb a running operation and take a risk on you screwing up as a manager.
I have worked with many experienced engineers over 50. A good friend of mine is mid-sixties and switched jobs this year. Maybe you won't find someone over 30 at Facebook, but established orgs are happy for qualified people. Especially if they are out of child-rearing age. The job pays what it does, plus-minus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2020, @11:43PM (1 child)
"unless you're autistic"
How did this become so acceptable a claim to make these days?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 19 2020, @12:26AM
It's well known - companies actively seek people with an autism diagnosis for repetitive boring jobs.
So bite me.i
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @01:48PM (2 children)
Maybe all the competent developers fail on CoC related social credit score grounds?
I use the console daily. How big could the code be? How hard could it be to keep it going? Harder than bowdlerizing blacklist, whitelist, master and slave throughout the massive kernel source?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @03:05PM
Linus caved. I guess the millions he earns every year (though he is already wealthy) were just too good to give up on principle. Plus his daughters have been fully indoctrinated in the West Coast matriarchal religion, so he probably also caved to keep his harpy daughter happy with him.
Spineless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @09:47PM
As TFA [phoronix.com] quotes Torvalds:
It sounds like a good case for *you* to maintain/improve that code.
If you want that functionality and are willing to, assuming you're competent to do so, donate your time and effort to keep it, I'm sure a whole bunch of folks would be really grateful for your hard work.
So what do you say? Have we found a new "sucker^Wmaintainer" for this code?
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday September 16 2020, @03:46PM (3 children)
Imagine how amazing the console and scrollback could be if it came under the umbrella of systemd!
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @04:03PM
Please don't joke about that, it's probably going to happen sooner than you'd think. It's really sad to see how much Linux has sold out over the last few years. Increasingly, I don't even bother with it other than for a few applications that I run in Virtualbox. There was a time when running FreeBSD rather than Linux involved meaningful sacrfice, but *BSD have been getting better and Linux has been regressing, or moving very slowly forward.
Being unable to scrollback means that you had better hope that somebody had the forethought to log things as you often don't know you need to scrollback until after the fact. You shouldn't need to constantly pipe input to a log file or use screen in case you need to read some of the earlier messages. I know that I personally tend not to scrollback unless something unexpected happens. If I expect to need to do so, I pipe the output through more or less or some other method to ensure that I get all of it, not just hope that what I want is there.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday September 17 2020, @02:25PM
I can barely imagine such a blissful world. Systemd can fix anything. It knows what you want before you even do! We don't even need systemd kernels- I'm waiting anxiously for systemd BIOS. Then we can all relax and do nothing forever.
/s
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2020, @11:49PM
Supposedly someone was working on just that, a userspace console subsystem for systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2020, @11:45PM
No surprise there, as people can't be assed to do the due diligence that Torvalds demands.
Much more "liberating" to hack around him with systemd and containers in the clouds.
One reason we should really be worried for the day GHK get the reins permanently.