So I see the bug about packages.gentoo.org continuously gets more people CC’d and people complain about the service being down. Luckily a few users have actually realized the reality of the situation: packages.gentoo.org is open source, requires open source components, and requires a freely available copy of the gentoo-x86 tree. Wow, they can just host it themselves.

Not that they should, because the code fucking sucks. Now that is coming from me (and it’s only meant to be half mean). It’s hard to criticize code that works, it runs much of gentoo (certainly portage is a monstrosity that many of you actually use successfully on a daily basis). I have crazy high software standards. That being said, I also tend not to write a ton of software, most of it small and single service. Writing good complex software is a difficult process. (more accurately, it’s time consuming, and I have a very small attention window)

That being said, a bundle of cgi scripts in python that barely work isn’t exactly a shining example of open source or software in general. But it ran packages.gentoo.org for years and we all (myself included) appreciated its inherit usefulness. That being said, as I stare at the code in cvs and wonder if I should spend some time on it..my mind keeps latching on to a rewrite. I really hate patching code that doesn’t work to be code that barely works. There is an inherent thing within me that just screams ‘rewrite this’. But then that has problems too.

You see rewrites have this common thing called feature creep. You can rewrite p.g.o, make it use html templates perhaps instead of print statements ;) Make it use 2 or 3 scripts instead of 18. Move the db/sql stuff to an abstraction layer (I normally don’t like abstraction layers, but this app is pretty simple.) But then I get to thinking…Hell we can use pylons or django! We can store more data! We can use a python -> XSLT bridge to generate output that is similar to the rest of www.g.o! We can do all kinds of things. But we probably shouldn’t.

Most people just want the service back up and they will take a few monkey patched python scripts to do it.