domingo, 12 de janeiro de 2014

Musings from a Sunday morning

In the last Sunday of 2013 and I was holding David in my left arm (then a two months old baby) while he was slipping. It was a normal morning with Sara (two years and one week older than her brother) wandering and running all over the place.

Since I had only one hand available and I had to stay still I decided to read some rss feedings. In one of them, that I now forget the source, I was redirected to this gcc bug report titled "__cplusplus defined to 1, should be 199711L".

The amusing part, at least to me, was that it has taken more than 10 years to close the bug. The bug was opened on 2001-01-25 for version 2.97 and finally closed and fixed on 2011-08-18 for gcc 4.7. The whole bug report is an entertaining reading and really appropriated for Saturday morning in the Christmas holidays (just 129 comments).

The interesting part was that the change was withheld  by the solaris port of gcc. While I suspect that although an important reason the bug was not overly urgent or else the social pressure to fix it would had justified a quicker action.

The musing part was twofold, on one hand how free(/libre) software works and one of the reasons why I enjoy it, the cooperation and the ideas exchange. The second reason was for being a Sunday with Susana, that understands and uses free software, and the two kids who (at least for now) could not care less about software as a social experience. Surely this inspires me with a smile and hope in the humanity.