The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Naming conventions that need to die (News)
Mon, 21 Oct 2024
Will Crichton wishes some naming conventions would die already, GitHub user brjsp noticed that Bitwarden's new SDK dependency isn't open source, Joaquim Rocha details his forking best practices, Sophie Koonin explains why you should go to conferences & Mike Hoye puts WordPress on SQLite.
Full Episode
What up nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, October 21st, 2024. Forever ago, Devin Zugal came on the show and told us about the making of GitHub Sponsors. In that conversation, we learned of her fascination with city planning and even encouraged her to start a podcast about it, which she did, by the way.
Turns out Devin's been doing far more than just studying and talking about city building. She announced late last week that her and some friends are creating a new town in California wine country called Esmeralda. How cool is that? Kind of makes you want to throw that crud app out the window and think bigger, huh? Okay, let's get in to this week's news. Naming conventions that need to die.
Here's Will Crichton writing in November of 2018. Quote, End quote. Will takes umbrage with names that point back to their inventor or discoverer, such as Plank Constant, Bernoulli Distribution, etc. He also doesn't like using numbers as names, like Type 1 Error, Type 2 Error, etc. lazily choosing a random word like Pig, Flink, Spike, Hive, Arrow, Kafka, all of which are Apache projects.
And he'd also like to expunge historical accidents like Master Slave, CAR versus CDR, Enlisp, etc. I will add another. Stop using names that are already overloaded. For instance, if the name you like has a lengthy disambiguation page on Wikipedia, go, go, maybe pick something fresh. Or I guess you could just throw Lang on there at the end and call it good. Bitwarden, no longer free software?
GitHub user brjsp noticed that the Bitwarden team recently introduced a dependency in their clients that contains a proprietary statement in its license. Quote, you may not use this SDK to develop applications for use with software other than Bitwarden, including non-compatible implementations of Bitwarden, or to develop another SDK, end quote.
Since it is not possible to build Bitwarden clients without this dependency, it appears that this has leavened the whole lump of software GitHub user XNDC followed up with, quote, also see pull request 898. It looks like this is part of a deliberate campaign by Bitwarden Inc., End quote. Later on in the thread, Bitwarden founder-slash-CTO Kyle Spearin posted this reply...
Quote, thanks for sharing your concerns here. We have been progressing using of our SDK in more use cases for our clients. However, our goal is to make sure that the SDK is used in a way that maintains GPL compatibility. One, the SDK and the client are two separate programs. Two, code for each program is in separate repositories.
Three, the fact that the two programs communicate using standard protocols does not mean they are one program for purposes of GPLv3. Being able to build the app as you are trying to do here is an issue we plan to resolve and is merely a bug. End quote. Kyle's statement was analyzed and addressed by user Gash on Lobsters. We'll link to that. How far down the rabbit hole will this one go?
Forking best practices. Here's Joaquim Rocha, quote, Fork maintenance, keeping your changes in sync with the latest updates from the original project, can quickly become a mess, trust me. Over the years, my work did sometimes involve maintaining forks of various open source projects. This is an excellent guide for what can be a tricky, aka frustrating, task.
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