"I don't know what the author meant by that..." (was "Re: [PATCH 6/6] tr2: log N parent process names on Linux")

On Thu, Aug 26 2021, Taylor Blau wrote:

I hope Taylor doesn't mind me quoting it, but he sent me this follow-up off-list:

    For what it's worth, I really struggled to write this. What I was trying
    to say was something along the lines of "let's give Emily a little more
    credit for not doing this right off the bat", but I didn't want to write
    that exactly, since I don't think it was your original intention.
    
    At the very least, saying something to the effect of "I don't know what
    the original author thought was so tough, here's a patch to implement
    it" isn't helping anybody, so I tried to focus on that.
    
    Anyway, just writing to you off-list to say that I do think you had good
    intentions, but that what you wrote may be read differently by others in
    a way that you didn't intend it to be.

First, thanks to Taylor for pointing this out, and second I'd like to apologize for that comment.

More than some "sorry someone read it that way", this really does read even to me, its author, shortly after having written it like something that's way more on the side of sneakiness than a charitable comment.

I.e. like some snipe-y paraphrasing of "maybe they found this problem too complex, but look how easy it is!" than something charitable that's meant to barely pass under the radar.

Hopefully it helps that I'm honestly just being a bit of an inconsiderate idiot here than actively malicious.

What I meant to accomplish here was to guide a reader of these patches through the same mental states I went through when reading the original patch.

I.e. I took it from its description that there were some unstated special-cases in reading procfs that made it harder to deal with than not. I think those comments were rather just a way to say that scraping procfs was a bit of a pain, and the MVP in 2f732bf15e6 was good enough for now, which is fair enough.

I rephrased those comments in v2 of this patch[1]. The summary starting at the 4th paragraph ("It's possible given the semantics[...]") is an edge case I hadn't considered when I wrote v1. I in turn copied that "unweildy" comment from an even older version[2], where the difficulties of parsing the "comm" field out of "/proc/*/stat" weren't apparent to me.

I.e. I think if I had to describe that interface now I would describe it as unwieldy, but wouldn't when I wrote v1[1] or that v0[2]. I.e. I think there's no convenient way to get full atomic snapshot of the process tree, so "give me the names of all my parents as an array" is definitely somewhere between brittle and unwieldy, in particular considering the hassle of parsing "/proc/*/stat" properly.

But I digress, which is also a problem I have with being overly verbose sometimes and weaving enough rope to hang myself with.

The point isn't the difficulties of the procfs(5) interface, but that particularly with a medium like the text-based communication we mainly use in this project it behooves the sender to think not only about what they're saying, but how what they're saying is going to be interpreted by the recipient and bystanders alike.

I think this is a case where I clearly failed at that, sorry Emily, and thanks Taylor for pointing this out to me.

1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/cover-v2-0.6-00000000000-20210826T121820Z-avarab@gmail.com/
2. https://lore.kernel.org/git/87o8agp29o.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/