Ask HN: What most annoying software problem you've recently faced?

4 points by caballeto 6y ago ↗ HN

I'll start with myself. Recently, I have tried to use Forestry.io to set up a personal blog, but discovered that they don't support out-of-box deploy to GitHub Pages, so I had to go with a bash script to build hugo blog and deploy to my github repo. Still find editing conf files easier than those fancy UIs.

3 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 15.4 ms ] thread

moviuro 6y ago ↗

Some badly written software will ignore nsswitch.conf(5) [0] and query the DNS instead of looking up in the hosts(5) file for some hosts that are designed there (redis).

sort(1)'s `-un` will truncate and delete input if it's not purely numerical [1].

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro/moviuro.bin/commit/d9cdf0556bb005...

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro/moviuro.bin/commit/0c83ac72d91798...

non-entity 6y ago ↗

I wanted to set up a rather niche SDK which involved building and configuring it use a native gcc toolchain, which slightly differs depending on the gcc version you have.

Well unfortunately, they cant be bothered to update their docs, which only have instructions for gcc 4.x and 5. I have gcc 8 and 9 on my system and couldn't manage to figure out how to configure it and their irc support channel is basically dead. They do have a mailing list, but I hate mailing lists.

Of course the 1st version of this SDK was windows only, and the legacy of that ksbpainfully visible. The default config has the toolchain specified as VS2015, iirc.

caballeto 6y ago ↗

Interestingly, I also had a disappointing experience with mailing lists. Hard to interact with, and takes long time to get a response. I find Slack or Zulip chats much more useful.