Code humor and inclusiveness

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2021-06-12 06:00:09

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By Jonathan Corbet June 11, 2021 Free-software development is meant to be fun, at least some of the time. Even developers of database-management systems seem to think that it is fun; there is no accounting for taste, it seems. Part of having fun is certainly allowing the occasional exercise of one's sense of humor while working on the code. But, as some recent "fix" attempts show, humor does not always carry through to developers all over the planet. Balancing humor and inclusiveness is always going to be a challenge for our community.

There is a function in the kernel scheduler that will, if things go badly wrong, inform users that a bug is present, describing it as "arch topology borken ". The message is, of course, breathtaking in its clarity; users will immediately know what to do when they see it. Recently, though, a well-intentioned developer sent a patch changing the message to read "broken" instead. This patch was not accepted, but it did result in a brief discussion explaining the nature of the intended joke to the submitter.