All things Linux

[Lori Claremont]

They never should have stopped using Multics...

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

There's a program called rsync that's used to backup files between locations. If you use Linux you probably know about it. It's not something you use as like its own program exactly, it's more like an automated process that you set up to run in the background in various ways.

A few days ago some people started noticing that rsync was suddenly failing in unexpected ways. When they went to the project hub to find out why, they discovered that the sole maintainer, "tridge", has started vibe-coding it. He didn't catch the new bugs because he also converted his test suite (poorly, evidently) from bash to Python (also presumably using the chatbot to some degree) and the new versions of the tools were bad.

People started spreading this information and a lot of them decided rsync couldn't be trusted anymore and they've started to either rollback and freeze to the pre-vibe version or have started exploring the OpenRsync fork as an alternative.

Tridge fought back with an open letter in which he claims to be the unfair victim of an anti-AI lynch mob, and a couple of Linux youtubers have made videos defending him as such, tending to spin the event as a few people going irrationally cancel-crazy after just happening to find out that the perfectly-fine rsync was being vibe-coded and leaving out that the only reason anybody found out to begin with was because rsync was breaking their scripts and losing their data.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Gentoo has switched to a fork of 3.4.1 with their own security patches. There's a [proper fork in codeberg](https://codeberg.org/fogti/rsync-nai) but I don't know what their security fix policy is.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Yeah rsync is a pretty critical utility so, I suppose with a replacement candidate that new you kinda want to wait a bit until enough people outside the project have had a chance to give it a thorough look.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

A few days ago some people started noticing that rsync was suddenly failing in unexpected ways. When they went to the project hub to find out why, they discovered that the sole maintainer, "tridge", has started vibe-coding it. He didn't catch the new bugs because he also converted his test suite (poorly, evidently) from bash to Python (also presumably using the chatbot to some degree) and the new versions of the tools were bad.

Now that's a pity, I mean "tridge" stands for Andrew Tridgell, PhD in computer sciences. He is one of the main authors of Samba, rsync is more like a side project.

So him doing such lazy things... why? I don't get it, because he's got the skills to do without.

 

[Noodles]

So him doing such lazy things... why? I don't get it, because he's got the skills to do without.

What I have seen in discussion on it, part of it it is he is the sole maintainer. Like he was kind of just trying to maybe lighten the load. Also he may have a huge influx of AI generated "bug" submissions, so going through them all, also alone, may have been too much.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Being the sole maintainer and having failed to build a community is a managing shortcoming and nothing you should fix with AI.

This influx of AI generated bug reports though is true. It is one of the reasons why Github went down recently, because the number of bug reports in a standard time period increased ten times or so.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Yes, his direct excuse is that he's old and considers himself retired and simply doesn't feel up to doing all the work, especially the volume of reports that are being dumped on his project by botters just like is happening to every open-source project the last two years. So he feels justified using bots to do the work. He's the sole maintainer because he does not want to hand the project off to anyone. He had done for a while a few years ago, but when that person recently fell short of free time Tridge took it back in 2024 rather than looking for another replacement. Yeah, you definitely don't want to hand a project to just anyone who raises their hand, especially not something as crucial as rsync; but my impression is that he isn't trying to find a successor at all.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

In more positive news, KDE is 30 years old this year, and they've added a new mascot!