Is This Acceptable?
This is the kind of bad attitude problem that we try to get away from in the Ubuntu community, why this program was accepted into universe (I presume from debian) I have no idea. This is my attempt to try out a game from the archives:
doctormo@delen~/$ conquest
Can not connect to locahost
doctormo@delen~/$ conquestd
conquestd: Common block ident mismatch.
You must initialize the universe with conqoper.
doctormo@delen~/$ conqoper
Poor cretins such as yourself lack the skills necessary to use this program.
I have only one response to the socially challenged individual who thought that was a good message:
doctormo@delen~/$ sudo apt-get purge conquest-gl conquest-server
Bye!
No, this is not acceptable! We should not use software made by such idiots!
From reading http://www.radscan.com/conquest/conqoper.6.html, it seems the message referred to the fact that you were not part of the right UNIX group (or not root). That said, it is indeed quite an offending message. Maybe a patch wouldn’t hurt to say something like “User needs to be in the %s group, or be root”.
Reported a bug in Debian, going to patch it in Ubuntu for now. Thanks for drawing the developers’ attention!
From the manpage top of google search results:
“conqoper supports a few non-interactive options listed below. When any of these options are specified, conqoper will perform the requested action and exit. When no options are specified, conqoper will run in an interactive mode. ”
Interesting take on what is meant by interactive mode.
Packages are simply imported from Debian, approval/testing is not required.
You should file a bug against the debian package.
http://bugs.debian.org/338208 “Cannot initialize universe”
http://bugs.debian.org/591453 “expletives in error message”
It’s very old code, pre-dating Ubuntu by some years.
Place a bug report on launchpad so that I can vote it up.
It could also be interesting to upgrade several packages made available in Ubuntu. Ask me here if you want a list.
I would have reacted the same way.
The package comes from Debian unmodified. We can’t and won’t integrate a social annoyance check in the New review process. In any case, as nearly as I can determine, the message had the effect desired by the developer, so even if not well framed it was effective.
ScottK: Your right in a technical sense and I don’t mean to introduce a policy onto package syncing. But this is a lack of professionalism and social politeness which is not just insulting but is demeaning to users. It reinforces the notion of exclusion and non-humanness in the work we do. Not the ethos and culture that we’re really trying to go for.
So in this social sense, your are wrong in focus in my opinion.
Seriously? Grow some damn skin. Geez.
Reminds me somewhat of the old “bucket of cocks” bug on Quod Libet
Well, I tried it on my Lucid box and I didn’t receive the message, but even so, Martin (and probably others) did. This is just one more example of why Linux is failing with the masses – attitudes, egos, and geek c*ckwaving with the whole “Geekier-than-thou” deal.
Code can be re-written and fixed over time, I only wish attitudes were as easily adjusted.
Doctor Mo, bro sometimes we got to have these kind of messages. I read it and burst out laughing. That alone made me want to get whatever the danged package was.
Sometimes we need to be offended. It’s why the Anglish love us Irish so much
.
As far as the ethos or culture, we are looking at what almost 30k in packages in Ubuntu repositories now? I hope the ethos we are going for is freedom above all else. The apps with offending messages will be few (unless we count all the ones that offend me, but my opinion is just an onion cause it rhymes). And what a support nightmare it would be if we go around changing all the messages in an app we don’t like, even when our dislike is valid. Imagine emailing the developer of an app with an error message she never wrote.
Jon Trulson (jon@radscan.com) seems to be the author.
I strongly oppose patching this package. If you don’t like the error message, you’re of course entitled to un-install the program and even free to ask the developer to change it (as conquest is still actively maintained). From my experience with the upstream developer, the error message is entirely meant in good fun. Considering the context, an obscure package in Universe, I think we should just respect the author’s creativity. I’m sure there are other packages in Debian/Ubuntu that have similar humor or even intentional derogative but I think we have better things to do then “thought police” the archive.
Maybe such packages could be tagged as “offensive” so people who don’t have the same sense of humor as the author of this application can know in advance not to install it.
Hey, Aoirthoir An Broc, Greenspan and ScottK, I think I am going to put a racially charged message against whites, blacks and Jews in my software, see how thick Greenspan’s skin is or how effective a message it would be to ScottK and lastly if Aoirthoir would find it funny.
Now Aoirthoir An Broc, Greenspan and ScottK, you should get some sense, if we have the same approach towards other bugs we would all be in trouble. bugs offend us, we try to get rid of them, an objectively offensive message in a piece of software is a bug, why is someone thin skinned to complain? Why is it impractical to want to remove it? Why is it funny?
ha! Now you know how Ubuntu and other Linux users behave towards Windows users
Cody: Humour usually has cues such as similie faces, winking, obviously funny text and unexpected juxtapositions of elements.
I don’t know, this isn’t funny just because it’s not a very skilful use of humour. So it just comes over as insulting.
Perhaps programmers who like to add jokes to their creations should attempt to get some training as a comedian _before_ publishing to a world wide audience to the internet with a very long memory.
Not why this warranted a blog post. Like Alan said, the code is old and it’s quite funny if your not a general user. If it’s not acceptable for the ubuntu community
a) file a bug
b) write a patch for ubuntu
c) write a patch for debian
d) write a patch for the app and see if the author will accept the patch.
It’s just a bug like anything else and should be fixed as such.
Acceptable? No. Hilarious? Most definitely.
Benjamin: Perhaps us Brits just have a more sophisticated and less elementally crude appreciation for humour.
*this for instance is an empire joke*
[...] Owens points out some less-and-less typical developer arrogance. While I agree that this is unhelpful to the point [...]
My take on this, edited a little from what I previously posted here, which boils down to: Don’t feel you owe Debian anything; they aren’t working with end-users in mind.
User-hostility is mainstream in Linux:
$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:09:56)
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> exit
Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit
>>>