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Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

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Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#141

Post by ghaff »

bcantrill wrote: post #97

Wow, an awful bug -- and brings back memories of a very similar bug that we had back in the late 1990s at Sun. Operating system patches on Solaris were added with a program called patchadd(1M), which, as it turns out, was actually a horrific shell script, and had a line that did this: rm -rf $1/$2 Under certain kinds of bad input, the function that had this line would be called without any arguments -- and this (like…

>A self-destruct button really doesn't make sense

Bryan--you mean Star Trek didn't get it right? Well, at least they didn't allow shell scripts.

It's an interesting philosophical question though. At what point do you decide that the user truly really can't want to do this even though they've said that they do?

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#142

Post by stonogo »

click170 wrote: post #110
stonogo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several problems with your ideas. The most important one is that programmers only call themselves engineers until it comes time to take legal responsibility for their work; then suddenly they're artists creating works for hire. Programmers have worked very hard through the years to create the current liability-free environment; people die because of health care programming bugs, pilots crash because of avio…

There's just no sense in telling a hobbyist what to do with his personal time. That means its no longer a hobby, it's a charity exercise. I think the problem is EULAs. Foss Eula's are pretty straight forward - no warranty: use at your own risk. Corporate software takes the same approach, and I think that's cowardly and underhanded because they are a profit driven entity which, if not incentivized properly, would lite…

Your analogy is flawed. What is happening instead is someone is making a lamp, and then putting a sign on it says "LAMP is a lamp that lights your home! It's compatible with electricity and is under no warranty, express or implied!" and offering to let you take it home.

And you seem to have missed the part where I explicitly said that both commercial and noncommercial software should be exposed to liability lawsuits. EULAs are a waste of everyone's time: anything distributed in an executable format should expose the distributor to liability suits for damages.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#143

Post by [deleted] »

stonogo wrote: post #91
FeeTinesAMady wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Valve should be sued over this, and lose. Sure, there will be clauses in their EULA stating that they aren't liable, but morally, those clauses should not be valid in any licensing agreement. Their commercial software caused damage to people, and they should pay through the nose for it.

There are several problems with your ideas. The most important one is that programmers only call themselves engineers until it comes time to take legal responsibility for their work; then suddenly they're artists creating works for hire. Programmers have worked very hard through the years to create the current liability-free environment; people die because of health care programming bugs, pilots crash because of avio…

[deleted]

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#144

Post by charonn0 »

stonogo wrote: post #91
FeeTinesAMady wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Valve should be sued over this, and lose. Sure, there will be clauses in their EULA stating that they aren't liable, but morally, those clauses should not be valid in any licensing agreement. Their commercial software caused damage to people, and they should pay through the nose for it.

There are several problems with your ideas. The most important one is that programmers only call themselves engineers until it comes time to take legal responsibility for their work; then suddenly they're artists creating works for hire. Programmers have worked very hard through the years to create the current liability-free environment; people die because of health care programming bugs, pilots crash because of avio…

Can anyone design a safe and reliable bridge with a span of indeterminate length across unpredictable geography?

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#145

Post by nkantar »

stonogo wrote: post #91
FeeTinesAMady wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Valve should be sued over this, and lose. Sure, there will be clauses in their EULA stating that they aren't liable, but morally, those clauses should not be valid in any licensing agreement. Their commercial software caused damage to people, and they should pay through the nose for it.

There are several problems with your ideas. The most important one is that programmers only call themselves engineers until it comes time to take legal responsibility for their work; then suddenly they're artists creating works for hire. Programmers have worked very hard through the years to create the current liability-free environment; people die because of health care programming bugs, pilots crash because of avio…

I think that would impact the viability of open-source software in a way that would change the whole world for the worse.

By a lot.

No one sane would put a pet project out in the open, and we'd all have far fewer kernels from which great things could grow.

(Unless you're specifically talking about closed-source software, in which case I just might largely agree with you.)

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#146

Post by noarchy »

irishcoffee wrote: post #101
noarchy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know if they do code review? Are pull requests blindly accepted?

If valve doesn't do code reviews, and if pull requests are actually blindly accepted (is that actually a thing? Do people ever actually blindly accept pull requests?) I don't think I have the wherewithal to give a useful response.

>is that actually a thing? Do people ever actually blindly accept pull requests?

Speaking only for myself, I've seen it with internal git repos at companies that have some name recognition. Obviously they'd never want it known that this happens, but it does.

So why does it happen? In the cases I saw, it was usually when people responsible for code reviews had "other things on their plate", and rather than hand off the review to someone else, they just merged it. During heavy pushes to get a build out the door, I saw a lot of this happening. Since I never said anything, I suppose I was part of the problem.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#147

Post by noarchy »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #54

Many of the comments mentioned this should have been caught in the code review. I suspect they don't perform code reviews. Makes me wonder, is there a tool, system, service for auditing how many 'pair of eyes' have reviewed a given line of code. This would be hard to determine, but could be useful. I am envisioning a heatmap bar or overlay that indicates the number of reviews a line of code has received.

It is trivial to find systems where you can assign specific people to review code, of course. Plenty exist. But to guarantee that they truly read a line of code, rather than skimmed/scrolled through it? Even if they paused their scrolling on that line, it doesn't mean that they really read it, or did so with proper understanding of what it was doing. Short of placing an actual comment or question for that line (demonstrating some real interaction), it doesn't seem like an easy problem to tackle.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#148

Post by endgame »

clebio wrote: post #119
endgame wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bashism. Open up "man bash" and search for "Remove matching suffix pattern".

which, regrettably, is not something you can do with `man` if you find `${0%/*}` in a script you're reading that someone else wrote.

No, but you can find it by searching for "%", because that's exactly what I did.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#149

Post by smtddr »

jsnell wrote: post #140
smtddr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw, making those "-i" aliases to rm, mv and cp are one of the first things I do on any new Linux machine I'm on. I don't understand how anyone works in the very unforgiving-of-accidental-delete *nix world without those aliases.

The "rm -i" alias is a horrible, horrible idea. Red Hat has a lot of stupid defaults, but this is probably the most questionable one. The useless confirmations on every deletion is so intrusive that people will instinctively try to work around it. In the best case they'll undefine those crappy aliases in their own shell config, or maybe gravitate toward writing /bin/rm rather than rm to avoid the alias expansion. In…

Hmm. Well I guess it's just me then. I've been burned so many times by rm/mv/cp that I actually do always read their confirmations and give it a 2nd thought. I rarely delete files unless it's a mass delete or files & folders that I do "rm -rf". and I pretty much never intend for mv or cp to overwrite an existing file.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#150

Post by enneff »

Alupis wrote: post #136
enneff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"most systems"? Not on Debian or Ubuntu, and that's most of them.

> Not on Debian or Ubuntu, and that's most of them Perhaps I should have said "sane systems" ;) Fedora ships with that alias by default FWIW.

I don't know why anyone would use Fedora by choice.
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