I’ve heard people mention curl and imagemagick. Any others that you know about?
- BeePlusPlus ( @BeePlusPlus@beehaw.org ) English73•1 year ago
Log4j was a fun one to watch unfold everywhere when things went haywire
- OneDimensionPrinter ( @OneDimensionPrinter@lemm.ee ) English12•1 year ago
That was not a fun week to be a developer.
- boonhet ( @boonhet@lemm.ee ) English18•1 year ago
As a non-java company developer at the time, I think our biggest challenge was explaining to everyone that Log4j didn’t affect us. It took a non-zero amount of effort because a lot of customers panicked. To be fair, it was also an industry where confidentiality is important.
- JackbyDev ( @JackbyDev@programming.dev ) English7•1 year ago
Also a lot of people were pulling it transitively.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English2•1 year ago
If you’re pulling log4j transitively, someone somewhere has made a serious mistake. Libraries should only depend on façades like SLF4J.
- BinaryEnthusiast ( @BinaryEnthusiast@beehaw.org ) English5•1 year ago
Oh man. I missed it by like a month. I graduated with my bachelors in December, and started in January. I was hearing horror stories from my new coworkers about how people had to cancel vacations to get stuff patched asap
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English4•1 year ago
It was if none of your code used log4j. I remember being very grateful that I had chosen
java.util.logging
and Logback for my Java logging needs.- OneDimensionPrinter ( @OneDimensionPrinter@lemm.ee ) English3•1 year ago
Lol, yeah for us we didn’t own any of the code that used it but depended on server software made internally that did. At the time we managed our own hosts, so it was a long week of deployments.
- elrac ( @elrac@kbin.social ) 5•1 year ago
That one was so annoying because you had to be using the log server to have any issues. If your network was locked down, the log server was disabled, or if you happened to be using a version that was from before the log server was added, then there were no issues. But clients just heard “log4j” and thought it was unsafe.
- Haus ( @Haus@kbin.social ) 1•1 year ago
Couldn’t remember which logging library it was, thanks for mentioning it, it would have low-key bugged me all day.
- Black616Angel ( @Black616Angel@feddit.de ) English55•1 year ago
Sci-Hub anyone?
Alexandra Elbakyan manages this truly awesome source of scientific papers completely on her own. She got sued twice and lost, had to change the URL multiple times due to takedowns and only gets along by donations.
- SkyeStarfall ( @SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English15•1 year ago
It is a crime to humanity to lock knowledge behind a huge paywall. She does God’s work.
And it’s not like the actual scientists/academics support knowledge being locked away either, or profit from it.
- a_statistician ( @a_statistician@programming.dev ) English2•1 year ago
shit, scihub is easier to use than the library, so we’re all grateful to her too.
- Gork ( @Gork@lemmy.ml ) English8•1 year ago
She’s the best thing that’s happened to the s scientific publishing field. I’m no longer a student but I still enjoy reading scientific papers and I’ll be damned if I have to pay $20 per article (which doesn’t go to the authors) since I no longer have access to a library that maintains relationships with these big publishers.
- Eric_the_Cerise ( @Eric_the_Cerise@fedia.io ) 55•1 year ago
Werner Koch, the guy who created, and who has maintained for 25 years now, pretty much all by himself, GnuPG, the modern email encryption replacement for PGP.
Just the other day, I realized I actually live just a few kms away from the guy, here in Germany … very tempted to reach out to him someday and actually buy him an actual coffee.
- spartanatreyu ( @spartanatreyu@programming.dev ) 2•1 year ago
That was the one I couldn’t remember, I got GPG and PGP confused but I remember it involved email encryption.
This guy was the reason that every security dev had those personal public keys clearly posted next to their email address on every announcement and blog post they ever released.
- OneDimensionPrinter ( @OneDimensionPrinter@lemm.ee ) English42•1 year ago
Had GPT summarize what happened.
The “left pad” incident refers to a controversy that arose in 2016 when a developer named Azer Koçulu removed his JavaScript package called “left-pad” from the NPM (Node Package Manager) registry. This caused a ripple effect, breaking numerous projects that relied on this package and highlighting the potential risks of relying on external dependencies. The incident sparked a debate about the stability and trustworthiness of the open-source ecosystem and led to discussions about best practices for managing dependencies in software development.
- Torty ( @Torty@beehaw.org ) English22•1 year ago
This is the one I came to post about. The fact there’s a library for this is so stupid to me.
I feel like it demonstrates how npm and modules have probably to some degree gotten out of hand.
- AnonymousLlama ( @AnonymousLlama@kbin.social ) 8•1 year ago
From memory the NPM blokes had to have a think about how they handle important packages because of that. Didn’t they revert the changes to left pad to ensure everything else didn’t break?
Fascinating to see the house of cards some of these solutions / libraries are built off
- JackbyDev ( @JackbyDev@programming.dev ) 6•1 year ago
Yes. They added it back. The policy now is that you can’t remove packages that are depended on (or something to that extent, I don’t know the specifics).
- ottercurling ( @ottercurling@kbin.social ) 2•1 year ago
Yeah I’m pretty sure Github themselves restored the package if I recall correctly
- Spiritreader ( @Spiritreader@kbin.social ) 5•1 year ago
That’s always the one I’m thinking of when anyone mentions the xkcd.
npm is one crazy infrastructure.
- spartanatreyu ( @spartanatreyu@programming.dev ) English41•1 year ago
cURL was one of these for a while (according to my limited understanding)
It was made in the 90s and it didn’t get commercial support until a few years ago.
- falsem ( @falsem@kbin.social ) 28•1 year ago
A developer maintained a NodeJS package called left-pad that would add leading whitespace to strings. He unpublished the package and broke basically the entire Node ecosystem until the repo owner forcibly republished it against the author’s wishes.
- jonne ( @jonne@infosec.pub ) English27•1 year ago
TzData is basically maintained by 2 guys. Pretty much every computer, phone and language relies on this database for timezone information.
- muttley ( @muttley@kbin.social ) 26•1 year ago
The core-js library is used by 1000s of top websites and is maintained by one guy
https://github.com/zloirock/core-js
- opr ( @opr@kbin.social ) 15•1 year ago
He also went to prison
- Highsight ( @Highsight@kbin.social ) 13•1 year ago
It’s honestly a fascinating read. We count so much on these kinds of people to keep our way of life intact, but when they ask for a little help in their own life, they get spat on.
- gk99 ( @gk99@kbin.social ) 7•1 year ago
It’s really, really sad that this sort of stuff doesn’t get picked up and funded for the greater good. Stuff like the NLnet Foundation exists, which has helped fund some pretty major projects (including the development of Lemmy), but something this critical I feel should be consistently funded by even larger entities in order to keep things working right.
- thgs ( @thgs@beehaw.org ) 6•1 year ago
That feels it went seriously bad
- Baldur Nil ( @balder1993@programming.dev ) 2•1 year ago
This story got me sad. But also, the guy should know better as not to dedicate all of his time on that. This article talk a bit about this issue.
- pe1uca ( @pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev ) English23•1 year ago
I didn’t even know about core-js until the dev complained about all the sites which use it. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md
- sasquash471 ( @sasquash471@feddit.de ) English21•1 year ago
Not a package but FileZilla is developed by Tim Kosse for over 20 years. I know that there are a lot of other FTP-Clients but FileZilla is my favorite. Easy to use and very very stable. There is a pro version sure, but most of the time the regular one does the job. My company throws thousands of dollars a month at Adobe, Microsoft and others. But they would never even think about giving anything to Tim Kosse and others, even though I’ve probably saved days of work with tools like this.
- Baldur Nil ( @balder1993@programming.dev ) English18•1 year ago
Node frameworks are famous for this purely because of a lack of standard library. I feel like most languages have a standard library that balance being generic but still providing utilities of common used stuff. So a company that doesn’t want to rely on a random guy’s library can build their own with only the features they want. But with Node, any complicated feature is using a tree of hundreds of random packages that you have no idea who created them.
- Fylkir ( @Fylkir@lemmy.sdf.org ) English6•1 year ago
Someone ought to write a Node.js fork that includes native implementations of popular modules that are unlikely to need maintenance like isodd. Then come with a custom version of NPM that refuse to install the packages.
- spartanatreyu ( @spartanatreyu@programming.dev ) English9•1 year ago
Deno basically did this by including a standard library that removes the need for the most popular modules. It’s the best js/ts experience I’ve ever had.
- Baldur Nil ( @balder1993@programming.dev ) English2•1 year ago
I just checked it and seems nice! Also seems to have been well received by the community.
- kate ( @kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com ) English18•1 year ago
Who maintains ffmpeg?
Looks like there has at least been a small team working on ffmpeg for some time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg#History
- TrustingZebra ( @Trusting@lemmy.sdf.org ) English1•1 year ago
There was some drama in the past with the Libva fork, but it’s mostly all passed by now.
- pwshguy (mdowst) ( @pwshguy@programming.dev ) English17•1 year ago
Basically every Windows sysadmin is indebted to Mark Russinovich and SysInternals. Fortunetly, PowerToys has come a long way because I’m pretty sure sysinternals haven’t been updated since Windows XP.
- GrishAix ( @Grishaix@feddit.de ) English9•1 year ago
Mark Russinovich now works for Microsoft and they own Sysinternals. Also the tools get updated quite regularly.
- RustySharp ( @RustySharp@programming.dev ) English9•1 year ago
“Mark works for MS” is a massive understatement. He’s CTO of Azure now.
And speaking of Sysinternals, arguably the most exciting update was when ProcessExplorer got a dark mode late last year :)
- BaadC0de ( @BaadC0de@programming.dev ) English4•1 year ago
Wait? ProcessExplorer has dark mode???!
- JWBananas ( @JWBananas@kbin.social ) 17•1 year ago
Would you like to hear an OpenSSL joke?
It’s 64k letters long and you can repeat it back to me when I’m done.
It’s “A”.
- nasal_demon ( @nasal_demon@lemmy.fmhy.ml ) 2•1 year ago
I don’t get it. What’s funny about "A complete film set up for the day less than a week and a half hours or so to get a new Hampshire the same thing we have to do yay for it to be done with the repellant the same thing we have to do you have to be a car or a goat does it make you feel better than I expected it to my mother-in-law and I will be there in a few minutes to be there for you to get back to me is getting a little bit of a man on the way to work through the ditches the other day and I will be there in the morning and I will be there in the morning…
- JWBananas ( @JWBananas@kbin.social ) 1•1 year ago
Did you just keep tapping the center predicted text suggestion?
- JWBananas ( @JWBananas@kbin.social ) 0•1 year ago
/c/YourJokeButWorse
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 2•1 year ago
angry crab noises
- PAPPP ( @PAPPP@lemmy.sdf.org ) English16•1 year ago
In the same kind of vein as imagemagick, Dave Coffin’s dcraw tool at least partly underlies almost every non-proprietary RAW image decoder, and some of the commercial ones (if they don’t use code, they use constant matrices and such).
He’s not a sole maintainer to any of his major projects anymore, but honorable mention to Fabrice Bellard who initiated both ffmpeg and qemu among other notable activities.
IIRC the Expat XML parser that’s embedded everywhere was basically on spare-time maintenance by Clark Cooper and Fred Drake for a couple decades, but I think they have a little more resources now.
SQLite is a BDFL situation more than single-maintainer, but D. Richard Hipp still has his hands on everything, and there are only a relatively small number of folks with commit access.